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Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I am glad to join my colleagues on the floor in support of Senator Booker's War Powers Resolution.

For those who wonder what a War Powers Resolution is, it is pretty simple. It is a very short resolution saying no war without a vote of Congress. We should not be at war with Iran without a vote of Congress.

Traditionally, when a President wants to go to war, the President will give an authorization to Congress, and there will be a debate and a vote in this body on that authorization. President Trump has decided to end-run the Constitution and end-run Congress by starting this war on his own without consulting with Congress, without consulting with allies--without consulting with virtually anyone--and ignoring a lot of advice he got about why he shouldn't get us into this war.

Now, many of you here know that we had a vote on a War Powers Resolution that I introduced a few days after the war began and that we fell short of the number of votes that were needed. At the time, Congress voted: Don't bother us. We may be at war--and, yes, the President is end-running Congress--but please don't bother us. Don't make us have a debate about whether this war should be authorized or not.

So what is different today than when we voted on my War Powers Resolution 10 days to 2 weeks ago? I will tell you what is different: 13 American troops have died, their futures cut off, families bereft and grieving. We learned yesterday that the number of Americans injured in this war--seriously injured in this war--now tops 200. Their lives are potentially forever altered by this illegal and unnecessary war.

We learned that a missile strike on an elementary school in Iran that killed 175 little kids was actually a strike by an American missile. President Trump said it was an Iranian missile, but we now know from the Pentagon's own evidence that the strike on the school that killed these innocent schoolchildren was an American missile.

Since we had the vote on the floor on my resolution, we have seen gas prices in the United States go up by, on average, about 60 cents a gallon. Virginians buy 8 million gallons of gas a day. The cost to Virginians daily, just in the gas increase, is nearly $5 million. Virginians are paying every day $5 million more for gas because of this war. I talked to a prominent American airline. They are paying $25 million a day more in fuel costs than they were before the war because of the war, and they passed that on to passengers who were traveling.

The economic dislocation is massive. We have seen the deaths of innocent civilians, the deaths of our own troops, injuries to our own troops, and the consequences are getting larger and larger and larger. Yet, as my colleague Senator Murphy says, we are still unable to get the Senate majority and the administration to agree to any public hearings where they have to answer questions that the American public has.

My public in Virginia is chock-full of parents of military members, chock-full of spouses of military members; and they have questions about their loved ones currently deployed or who may be deployed. But the administration is afraid to have public hearings.

I am going to conclude and say this: Today, I learned the reason why we are not having public hearings in one of the key committees, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We had a closed-door hearing, and Senator Murphy asked the chair, our colleague from Idaho, who is nothing if not a straight shooter--he will always give you a straight answer: Why are we not having public hearings about this war in the committees of jurisdiction, the Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee? And the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee explained that he thought it would be counterproductive for the administration officials to be examined by Senators in public about their decisions.

It would be counterproductive to have to answer why you view this as worthy of sending our kids to their possible death or injury? It would be counterproductive to have to answer in public why is this worth nearly a billion dollars a day of American taxpayer money? It would be counterproductive to answer questions about didn't you think this would cause massive economic problems for everyday American citizens?

This war is being hidden in classified because the administration does not have the confidence in its own position sufficient to be willing to answer the basic questions that we all have.

If our young people are being asked to risk their lives in this war, then we shouldn't be afraid to put the facts of the war before the American public, where they can make a judgment about whether it is in the best interest of this Nation. And that is why I am so glad to have cosponsored this resolution.

I will be voting for it, and we are not going to stop putting this issue before the body until the Senate does what the Senate is supposed to do and only engage in warmaking when it has been determined by Congress that it is in the best interest of the country.

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