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Floor Speech
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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I have a few statements I would like to make this morning, but I would like to respond to the Republican leader's statement that he just completed.
I am not naive when it comes to Iran. I know what is happening there from press reports. Their treatment of women is abominable. There is no excuse for it. And the protests in the streets of Tehran and all across that country really are an expression of human dignity which the United States--at least I as a Senator in the United States--supports publicly.
Secondly, there are no excuses for the assistance Iran is giving to Vladimir Putin and his ruthless attack on the people of Ukraine. I won't make excuses for that or any other terrorist conduct by Iran.
But for the record--for the record--it was President Obama who moved forward with the notion that we ought to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They are guilty of bad conduct in many quarters, but we didn't want them to have a nuclear weapon. We didn't think it made America any safer, the Middle East safer, or our allies like Israel any safer either.
So President Obama pushed for an arms control when it came to the development of nuclear weapons, and Iran had put together a coalition which sounds amazing today. To think that he could gather at one table in this effort--Russia, China, Great Britain, France, the European Union, and the United States in this effort to stop the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon was nothing short of a political miracle.
It was resisted every step of the way by the Republicans. They didn't want to have this. We did it anyway. And with this nuclear effort was an inspection team--an international inspection team--on the ground in Iran to make sure they didn't violate it. We were safer--not by much, but we were safer then. And then who came along but President Donald Trump who said his approach would be just the opposite. We are going to eliminate the whole program to stop Iran from developing a nuclear program, and he did.
So for the Republicans to come before us today and argue that we are not being tough enough on Iran, I would like to tell them that I am not going to make excuses for Iran and its foreign policy. But there are nuclear weapons we had a chance to do something about, and some of us voted for it, some of us voted against it. I think that ought to be a matter of public record.
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