[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Pages 19713-19715]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 FREEDOMS ENSHRINED IN THE CONSTITUTION

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise to speak about San Bernardino, about 
the decades-long fight that our free society faces, and about our 
dangerous unwillingness to tell the truth about the nature of this 
battle--about who our enemy is.
  We are at war. The American people already know this. Our enemies 
obviously knows this. It is only this town where our so-called leaders 
dawdle and bicker, pander and misprioritize. It is only this town that 
seems confused. Washington ignores what it cannot escape, and that is 
both a tragedy and a crisis, for it is impossible to win a war when one 
does not even admit that one is in a war.
  Let's start by admitting that this war is different from most of the 
wars of the past. This is not about borders or territory. This is not 
about gold or other material goods. We typically think about state 
actors--about traditional governments going to war with traditional 
governments. In this war, however, the enemy includes many state 
actors, many armed groups who are developing global reach in this 
flatter, technologically linked world.
  Our enemy is merciless and barbaric. They are willing to kill people 
who are not on traditional battlefields. They will kill noncombatants. 
They will kill women and children. They will kill at holiday parties 
and restaurants, at Jewish delis and sporting stadiums.
  Just as sad as the evolution of our enemies, though, this war is hard 
for the American people to get their heads around because we have so 
much confusion right now--so much drift, so much orphanhood--not just 
about our enemies but about exactly who we are and about exactly what 
we are fighting to defend.
  This body, the Congress, tries to do far too many things, and we do 
very few of them well, but when there are really important tasks that 
we should be tackling, well then folks seem to be unable to muster the 
energy or the courage or the time or the will to focus diligently on 
the task before us.
  Today we have such a big task before us, and I will humbly suggest 
that before another person in this body or another member of the 
national media stands up to scold the American people about how they 
could possibly entertain voting for candidate X or Y, perhaps we should 
look in the mirror at why so many of our people are running to 
demagoguing leaders.
  Do Senators really not understand what is happening? Did anyone 
really not see this coming? I think it is obvious why the people are 
doing what they are doing--because they get so little actual leadership 
out of this town, out of either end of Pennsylvania Avenue and out of 
either political party. Make no mistake, there were some genuinely 
dreadful things said on our national stage yesterday, but they were 
almost completely predictable. Did anyone really not see this coming?
  Why is it that these words are so attractive to so many? Why do they 
find so many followers? Because they are comforting to a people who are 
scared. They are food to a people who are starved for leadership.
  Sunday night was a desert. Monday night was a flood. Neither are what 
our

[[Page 19714]]

people need or really what they, at their best, want, but don't be 
surprised that a people being misled by a political class that is in 
denial about the nature of the fight we face--don't be surprised if 
these people come then quickly to desire very different, much more 
muscular words and utopian pledges.
  This town's conversations are so often so completely disconnected 
from the people. Do you want to know what people calling my office and 
stopping me in the grocery store--since Paris and now since San 
Bernardino--want to talk about? They want to talk about what Sharia law 
is and how many Muslims actually believe in it. It is a fair question 
for moms to ask. They want to talk about American exceptionalism. They 
want to know what we are for, what we are against, and what do we unite 
around. We should talk more about these things. For a minute tonight 
let's just step briefly beyond the media cycle and look at where we 
stand. This is a clash of civilizations. This is a fight between free 
people and a totalitarian movement. Let me say clearly that recognizing 
a clash of civilizations is not at all to want one, but recognizing one 
is simply the truth in this matter.
  We are free and our enemies hate it. They hate that my wife leaves 
our house and drives. They hate that my daughters know how to read. 
They hate that we decided where we would go to church on Sunday. They 
hate us not because of any particular thing we have done by omission or 
by commission; they hate us because of who we are. They hate us because 
we have a Constitution that enshrines these freedoms, and this is the 
Constitution that we should be uniting around--uniting to defend. We 
should fight to defend the framework that has secured the freedom of 
speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the 
freedom of assembly for all Americans for 200 years--not initially 
successfully judging every man by the content of his character instead 
of merely the color of his skin but eventually guiding us beyond this 
original American sin and toward a more perfect union.
  This weekend I went to San Bernardino. My wife and I laid flowers at 
a memorial that has popped up on a sidewalk outside the site where 35 
of our neighbors bled this week; 14 of them ultimately died in this 
massacre. We talked to our American neighbors there in a neighborhood 
that should not be part of a war zone, but that neighborhood will now 
forever be a battlefield memorial. Some of the people grieving there 
wondered aloud to us: Why are our politicians so small, so mealy-
mouthed? One marine asked my wife if Washington really even cares about 
the victims of jihadi attacks like this. One woman asked why no one in 
Washington seems to be a full-throated lover of America. They are 
wrong, of course, about the caring and the loving. There is a lot of 
care and love, but they can be forgiven for wondering why we are so 
unable to be full-throated about the big things.
  We owe it to those who died this week, and to their families, to be 
clear and truthful about the nature of this conflict. We owe it to 
those 14. We owe it to their families, we owe it to the service men and 
women in uniform who are fighting abroad right now to defend our 
freedoms, some of whom will come home in caskets, and we owe it to the 
families of those who have not yet died--but who will--in the next 
jihadi attack on our homeland, for it is coming.
  All adults know that the next attack is coming. You don't need to see 
the classified briefings that some of us see to know the future is 
dangerous. The San Bernardino 14 will not be the last Americans to 
bleed and die in our homeland because we are a free society. So we 
should tell the truth about the enemy we face. We should tell the truth 
about them, and we should dig down deep to be honest not only about 
them but about who we are. We should now reaffirm our core values that 
unite us as a people.
  We are not at war with terrorism, which is just a tactic. We are not 
at war with some empty sociological label called radicalism or 
extremism, as if it has no connection to belief or ideology. We are not 
just at war with ISIS, though we are obviously at war with ISIS, but 
there will be another group that will raise the black flag of death 
long after ISIS has been routed out of Iraq and Syria.
  This is not about workplace violence, this is not about global 
warming or gun shows. This is not about income inequality. This is not 
about some kid from a broken home somewhere in the Middle East, as 
tragic as broken homes are both at home and abroad. Again, against a 
whole load of hand-wringing mush, we need to remember that this attack, 
and know that our next attack, is not because of anything we have done 
wrong. This is about who we are. This is about the nature of freedom.
  Who are we? We are a people, 320 million of us, who unite around the 
Constitution and the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of 
speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom of the press, and the 
freedom of assembly to all Americans of every creed and every 
tradition.
  I am a Christian. I am not a Muslim. I am also in this life an 
American, and I have taken an oath of office to the Constitution, and 
so, as an American, I stand and defend the rights of American Muslims 
to freely worship even though we differ about important theological 
matters.
  In America we are free to believe different things and to argue about 
those beliefs. It matters what you think about the nature of God, about 
revelation, and about salvation. It matters what you think about Heaven 
and Hell. In fact, it matters so much and we think these things are so 
important that you couldn't possibly solve any of them by violence.
  America is about the right to argue about our differences with our 
neighbors but to make those arguments free from violence. We, in this 
land, under the constitutional creed, come together as a community of 
Americans to unite around core American values: freedom of religion, 
speech, press, and assembly.
  So now, as it is emphatically and indisputably clear, that we are not 
in a war with all Muslims, let us tell the truth that we most certainly 
are at war with militant Islam. We are at war with violent Islam. We 
are at war with jihadi Islam. We are at war with those who believe in 
killing in the name of religion.
  This is, in fact, precisely what America means. It is about being 
free to raise your kids, free to build a corner store, and free to 
worship and to assemble without the fear of violence. We can argue 
about religion because many of us do disagree, and then we come 
together as Americans to protect and defend each other against 
religious killing.
  There are many hand-wringers in Washington who refuse to name the 
enemy we face. They refuse to admit we are at war with militant Islam, 
with jihadi Islam, with violent Islam. They dance around platitudes and 
offer empty labels hiding behind a worry--an understandable worry--that 
Muslims in America could face backlash. I share this fear, and I 
believe that telling the truth about who is and who is not our enemy is 
actually the one sure way of avoiding that danger.
  I think those who are refusing to tell the truth about our enemies, 
those who will nonsensically claim that the next jihadi attack is 
somehow just another random case of workplace violence are making the 
backlash far more likely, not less likely.
  Here is how I think the backlash actually happens: The people who are 
supposed to be laser-focused on defending the American people--that is 
us--mouth silly platitudes that show we are either too weak or too 
confused to keep our people safe.
  Then, a megalomaniac strongman steps forward and starts screaming 
about travel bans and deportation and offering promises to keep all of 
us safe, which to some--and I think actually to many more than those of 
us in this body seem to understand--sounds much better than not being 
protected at all.
  You want to stop a backlash against American Muslims? Then stop 
lecturing Americans that they are supposedly stupid to be frightened 
about

[[Page 19715]]

jihadis who actually do want to bomb their kid's sporting event and 
instead use your pen and your phone as Commander in Chief to start 
telling us what your plan is to actually find and kill those who want 
to do us harm. Start telling us what your actual plan is to have a 
Middle Eastern map that isn't generating more failed states year over 
year that become the terror training camps of next year.
  This country invented religious liberty. This is the most tolerant 
Nation the world has ever seen. Our people need a little less elite 
sermonizing about tolerance in our communities and a little more 
articulation of the shared constitutional principles around which we 
are united and a lot more articulating of an actual battle plan to win 
the war that is going to be ours for the next many decades.
  If you are worried about backlash--if you are worried about the 
obviously over-the-top rhetoric from unserious Presidential 
candidates--perhaps it will be useful for those of us who have the 
actual job of protecting the Constitution to tell the truth. We should 
be clear about who we are and about the freedoms we stand for, and we 
should be clear about those who would try to kill us because we believe 
in these freedoms.
  We are at war with militant or jihadi Islam, but we are not at war 
with people who believe in the American creed, which includes the right 
of people--every people, every faith tradition--to freely worship, to 
freely speak, to freely assemble, and to argue. We are not at war with 
all Muslims. We are not at war with Muslim families in Lincoln or in 
Dearborn who want the American dream amid our pluralistic society for 
their kids, but we most certainly are at war with those who want to 
spread a variety of Islam that aims to motivate the killing and the 
freedom-taking of other Americans.
  This fight will be decades long, and we will win it, but we will not 
win it by denying that the fight exists. We will not win it by being 
unclear about who we are and who they are. We will win it instead by 
being clearer about both who they are and who we are. We will win it by 
reaffirming our core constitutional values. We will win it because of 
who we are: a people who believes in freedom and a people who is 
willing to fight and even to die to preserve a free society for all 
Americans.
  Macbeth includes that aching line: ``Life is a tale, told by an 
idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.'' The context is an 
aimless people, drifting from who they are, drifting toward nihilism 
signifying nothing.
  This should not be us. This cannot be us. For America does signify 
something--something special. America is the belief that everyone--
Christian, Jew, Muslim, Black and White, man and woman, rich and poor, 
fifth generation, first generation--everyone is endowed by our Creator 
with certain inalienable rights. Our government is our shared project 
to secure and safeguard those rights. Our Constitution--our shared 
creed--gives us a framework for that order of liberty. When 
politicians--whether incumbents who seem to have forgotten their oaths 
or candidates trying to run merely on the bluster of their 
personality--don't talk about the Constitution, when they don't defend 
first principles, when they refuse to prefer substance over sound 
bites, when they nonsensically say either that our enemy has nothing to 
do with Islam or conversely that every Muslim is to be prejudged 
guilty--well, then our national conversation crumbles into sound and 
fury. That is not us, for we are Americans.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.

                          ____________________