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Floor Speech
I come here, like my colleague, to defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
Since George Washington was President and he had to deal with a Congress, every President has had to deal with a Congress or Members of Congress who really wanted to be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. The Founding Fathers wisely said that that power should lie in the hands of the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States.
Over many, many years, Presidents have used military force to protect the United States of America. Indeed, they take an oath that they will do so. Not only do they have the right to do so, they have the duty to do so.
So what are we talking about here? Donald Trump has made the observation, as has every American, that we are losing tens of thousands of Americans, both young and old alike, to illegal drugs that are brought to this country by terrorist organizations mainly. As a result of that, we have done, as has been suggested, law enforcement activities within the United States, outside the United States. And we have picked away at it and picked away at it, and it simply has not been effective.
What Donald Trump decided to do was to take appropriate military action against an invasion. That invasion comes from those terrorists. They invade the United States of America with boats loaded with this poison. It is distributed around the United States, and it kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Now, let's assume that these terrorists, instead of using the drugs, were using explosives. If they loaded up one of these boats with explosives and it was headed for the United States of America and they had a distribution system in place, as they do for drugs, right now, and they were distributing these explosives around the United States and killed tens of thousands of people every year, there wouldn't be a peep from anyone about the use of force by the President of the United States to stop this. That is exactly what is going on here. There is no difference whatsoever.
The President of the United States has ordered the troops, when they determine that there is a boatload of these drugs headed for the United States, to sink the boat and put it on the bottom of the ocean.
Now, I am the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee and, obviously in this setting, I can't tell you the method or the means, but I can tell you that we have absolute, total, 100 percent proof that every single one of those boats that went down was loaded with drugs.
So, as a result of that, the President of the United States has done good work so far in stemming the flow of these drugs to the United States.
I have told the President face to face: Thank you, Mr. President, for what you are doing, and I want to thank you on behalf of the parents who will not have to early bury one of their children because of the drugs that were coming into this country. Instead those drugs are lying at the bottom of the ocean.
Thank you, Mr. President, for what you did. Keep up the good work. Continue to stem the flow of these drugs coming into the United States. The President has the absolute right and, not only that, the absolute duty to do this.
If you don't think so, take him to court and sue him. That is what you need to do if you think that is what is right. There is no court in the world that is going to stop him from using the military might of the United States to protect the United States, which is exactly what he is doing here.
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Mr. RISCH. I will.
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Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, I agreed to respond to questions relating to this. There is nothing in this that has anything to do with pardoning or has anything to do with the other country that you are talking about. So I am not going to engage in debate on that issue.
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Mr. RISCH. Well, the last one wasn't very direct, but if the good Senator cares to have a direct question, I will be happy to do that.
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Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, Senator, first of all, that has been done over a number of years, and it has proven to be incredibly ineffectual.
I have had lengthy discussions with the Secretary of State, who obviously is a person who has been focused on this area of the globe for a long time. And he says that they consider this, the terrorist groups consider this a cost of doing business, that kind of a boarding or what have you.
But what has happened is, with those boats being sunk the way they are with the people who are in the process of launching this attack on the United States being killed, that has drastically--drastically-- lowered the number of boats that are coming to the United States loaded with drugs.
This is the most effective way to do it. Bless you, Mr. President, for doing it. Keep it up. Continue to put these drugs on the bottom of the ocean.
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