The Green New Deal

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Thank you very much, Mr. President.

Once again, I am very pleased to join my friend the Senator from Vermont on the floor to press this body to take seriously its constitutional responsibility and its responsibility to ensure that the United States doesn't enter into hostilities abroad other than in those situations that are vitally necessary to protect our national security interests.

I am so proud to have worked with Senator Sanders, Senator Lee, and many others here to build a truly bipartisan coalition that is going to do something that, as Senator Sanders said, is historic.

I have been coming down to the Senate floor for 4 years now raising concerns about U.S. participation in this civil war. When the United States first entered into an agreement with the Saudis to help them in their bombing campaign, very few people could probably locate Yemen on the map. Today, it is the subject of national conversation. With passage in the Senate and the House, regardless of what the President chooses to do, the world now knows that the United States is paying attention to the world's worst humanitarian disaster--a nightmare inside Yemen that is taking the lives of tens of thousands of people.

Sometimes humanitarian disasters and famines are caused by natural events, those that we cannot control--droughts, for instance. This is a manmade humanitarian catastrophe that the United States has something to say about, and we are going to say something about it in a matter of hours.

Let me just say a few things about what will happen if we pass this resolution and it becomes law and what will not happen if we pass this resolution and it becomes law. I think Senator Sanders covered this, and we have covered this enough.

The first thing that happens is that we uphold the Constitution.

I get it. Declaring war is a lot tougher today than it was 40 years ago or 100 years ago. It is not as if there are big armies that march against each other across open fields. Very rarely is there a nice peace treaty signed to wrap up hostilities. Now we have shadowy and more diffuse enemies who are harder to define. We have wars that seem to never end. But that doesn't obviate Congress's responsibility to set parameters around war. Just because it is harder to declare war today doesn't mean that we still don't have the responsibility to do it.

Over and over again, we have outsourced the decision on hostilities to the President, whether it be President Obama or President Trump. In large part, it is because we just don't want to be in this business any longer.

There is no doubt that when we are helping Saudi Arabia drop bombs on churches, on weddings, on cholera treatment facilities, and on some legitimate military targets, we are engaged in a war, and we should declare it here. That is the first thing that happens.

The second thing that happens if we pass this resolution and it becomes law is that we wash our hands of the blood associated with being a participant in the creation of one the world's worst humanitarian catastrophes.

Never has the world seen a cholera epidemic as big as this one, at least in recorded history. There is no secret as to why there is a cholera epidemic; it is because the Saudis bombed the water treatment facilities, so the water isn't clean any longer.

Whether or not the United States knew about this or signed off on it, we don't know, but the fact is, we should not be associated with a bombing campaign that the U.N. tells us is likely a gross violation of human rights.

Third, if we pass this resolution and it becomes law, peace becomes more likely.

We have evidence of why that is because when we passed this resolution in the Senate at the end of last year, not coincidentally, within days, a partial ceasefire was announced in Hodeidah. Why is that? The reason is twofold. One, when the Saudis realize they don't have a blank check from the United States any longer, they get more serious about peace. Two, the Houthis, who are the other party to this conflict and who don't believe that the United States is an honest broker or that anyone will actually be serious about enforcing concessions they give, come to the table because they see that the United States and others that we support as part of the negotiations will actually be honest brokers and that we are only willing to go so far with our Saudi partners.

The fourth thing that happens, as Senator Sanders has mentioned, is that we are able to send a message to Saudi Arabia and specifically to the Crown Prince that they need to change their behavior if they want to maintain this relationship.

Some people are going to vote against this because they say it has nothing to do with Jamal Khashoggi. It does. Jamal Khashoggi's name isn't in here. The names of the other American residents who are currently being detained by Saudi Arabia aren't in here. But make no mistake--Muhammad bin Salman, who ordered this campaign of political repression--his No. 1 foreign policy priority is the perpetuation of the war inside Yemen.

Given the violation of trust that has occurred with the United States over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the coverup of it, it stands to reason that we would rethink our association with other priorities of the Crown Prince's if he blatantly lied to us about his participation in the human rights violation that has become the obsession of this country and the world. The two are connected. This will be seen as a message to the Saudis that they need to clean up their act.

What will not happen? Casualties will not get worse. The Trump administration says: Well, if we are not part of the coalition, it just means we can't stop civilians from being killed.

Well, forgive me, but it doesn't seem like we have been doing too good of a job thus far if 85,000 children under the age of 5 have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in the crossfire. We can't get into classified information here, but let's just say there is a limit to what the United States can do as part of this coalition.

There is no evidence to suggest that casualties will get worse. In fact, the cover being lifted of U.S. endorsements of this bombing campaign will make it harder for the Saudis to take chances because they know they don't have the United States to fall back on.

Second, the Saudis will not go somewhere else. This idea that if we just say we are not going to participate in this one single war with you, that the Saudis will all of a sudden break relationships with the United States and go buy their military equipment from Russia, is belied by how this alliance has worked for years. The complication of the Saudis turning around and choosing to go to another partner, if that is how this works, that the nature of our relationship is one in which the United States can never ever refuse a request from the Saudis to participate in one of their military endeavors overseas, then that is not an alliance. An alliance allows you to tell your partner when you think they are wrong and choose, unless you have a treaty obligation of some sort, whether you engage with them.

Lastly, as I mentioned, some people say we will lose our political leverage; that we will make it harder for negotiations to happen. It is exactly the opposite, as evidenced by the fact that when we were debating this resolution last time, as people were telling us that if we passed it we wouldn't have as much leverage in the negotiations, successful negotiations were being concluded in Stockholm.

This is a historic moment for the Congress to step up and say that enough is enough. We are made weaker in the eyes of the world when we willingly participate in war crimes and when we allow for our partner to engage in activity that leads to the slaughter of innocents.

Never mind the conduct of a war in which our true enemies, al-Qaida and ISIS, are getting stronger and stronger by the day. I hope we have the same bipartisan stamp of approval on this resolution today as we did last year, and I hope it stands as a new day for the Senate when we are more willing, on a bipartisan basis, to do our concurrent responsibility, along with the executive branch, to set the foreign policy of this Nation.

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