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Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am humbled to follow my colleague from Illinois. No one is more articulate on the question of the cost of war than Senator Duckworth, and I agree with everything that she said about the importance of this moment.

Listen, maybe the most sacred clause in the Constitution is the warmaking clause. Our Founding Fathers gave a lot of thought about the danger of allowing one individual to send this country into foreign conflict, to send our young men and women overseas to face harm and potential death. Our Founding Fathers decided that that had to be a question answered by the American public, and that is why the decision to go to war was vested not in an Executive or a Monarch or a King but in the Congress--in the people's House and in the Senate.

I think this is probably the most significant military engagement of many of our lifetimes that has gone without a debate and a vote on the Senate floor. It is extraordinary not just that we have not had a vote, as is required by the Constitution, not just that the President persists in this action without an authorization by Congress, but that there hasn't even been a single public hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee or in the Armed Services Committee to require the administration to explain to the American people and to the U.S. Senate why we are in this war, what the goals are, and what the endgame will be.

I think it is extraordinary and heartbreaking and outrageous that the Senate is not doing its duty under the Constitution to require the administration to ask permission to go to war and to explain itself before Congress, but I guess I understand why. This is an attempt to hide the incompetence--the growing incompetence--of this war.

The President said, the other day, he was really surprised when Iran started bombing its neighbors. Like, the first page of the briefing book that a President would get on the consequences of a major military strike on Iran would be that missiles and drones would start to be sent to American bases, American forces, and our partner forces in the region.

Reports are that the President just kind of guessed that they wouldn't gum up the Strait of Hormuz even though the second page of that briefing book would have told you--you know what?--the first thing Iran will do if you assassinate the Shia religious leader in the middle of the holy month and bomb them relentlessly day after day and hour after hour is they will close the Strait of Hormuz.

There is no plan to protect our partners in the region. Our partners are running out of interceptors as we speak. The region is on fire. There is no plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It is closed today. It will be closed tomorrow. It will be closed the day after. Prices are going to go up for everybody in this country. The billionaires--the people who show up to have dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in the middle of the war--will be able to afford it, but regular people who live in Ohio and Connecticut and Illinois, they won't be able to afford these high gas prices.

Every day, there is a new revelation of the incompetence. Here is one from the last 24 hours. Apparently, President Trump decommissioned a bunch of our minesweepers. There was a really competent British minesweeper in the region that left days before the invasion began. We literally gave away our capability to clear the strait of mines right before we took military action that would knowingly cause the strait to be closed and mined. You can't make this up.

The reason we are bringing this vote tonight, the reason that Senator Kaine did the same thing earlier, and the reason that we will continue to bring these votes is that we have an obligation to have a debate, to have votes on the question of war, especially on the question of this incompetent war.

I have sat in classified briefing after classified briefing, and I still have gotten no answer on how this war ends. I actually don't think any of my Republican colleagues could explain how this war ends. Apparently, a worse regime that is more provocative to the region and more adversarial to the United States' interests will remain in charge of Iran when we decide to stop bombing. Estimates are that they will be able to rebuild their missile and drone capability in months after we declare an end to the hostilities. The nuclear program will still be there because you can't bomb out of existence either knowledge or the fissile material that is buried deep under the earth.

So, at the end of this, we are going to have raised prices for everybody here. We are going to have cost a lot of American lives. We are going to have set on fire the region. By the way, a new war already having killed 1,000 people is breaking out between Israel and Lebanon, and Iran is going to be more dangerous, not less dangerous at the end.

We need to debate this in our committees and on the Senate floor, so I am glad to stand here with Senator Booker. I don't think this will be the last time that we will have this debate.

What are we doing this week?

We are talking about voter fraud that doesn't exist when there is a war happening that is illegal and when prices are going through the roof. This is what we should be debating right now. This is why the Senate exists, to stand here and debate the most important questions. And what is more important than war and peace and 13 Americans dead overseas and the cost of war being borne by poor families here at home? This is what we should be debating this week.

So we will use our opportunity under the statute and under the rules to make sure that we have the opportunity--at least for an hour, at least for an hour each day--to be able to talk about this incompetent, illegal, unconstitutional war with no plan to end it.

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