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Floor Speech

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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise in support of Senator Murphy's War Powers Resolution, which I am proud to cosponsor.

I came to this body in 2013, and as I have described on multiple occasions on the floor under both Democratic and Republican Presidents, I came with one obsession, and that obsession was that the Nation should not be at war without a vote of Congress.

That obsession was born out of twin experiences--having had a child in the military and then having been Governor of Virginia and watching my Virginia guard members deploy repeatedly into Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of the years that I served in office. I had gone to too many deployments, too many homecomings. I had gone to too many wakes and to too many funerals to simply allow war to be waged on autopilot or at the say-so of any President--Democrat or Republican--no matter what their previous experience in military matters or lack of experience was.

The Founders of the Constitution were wise to decide that committing our kids' lives to war was not a decision that should be made by one person. There are exceptions recognized in the Constitution. A President can take action without Congress. If there is an ongoing attack on the United States, in self-defense, no permission is needed. A President can initiate military action if Congress has previously voted on an authorization that covers it; but other than that, there no shortcut, and there is no E-ZPass lane, and there shouldn't be.

So this is now the third resolution--and I thank my colleague Senator Murphy for bringing it--to basically ask the question of this body: Have we seen enough? Have we seen enough that we should at least have public hearings about this war? Have we seen enough that we should have a debate about whether this war should be authorized by Congress or not?

We plan on coming back every week and asking the question: Have we seen enough?--until the Senate does what the Senate is supposed to do according to the Founders, to the Framers, of our Constitution.

Since we were here last week, a number of things have happened. The number of casualties has continued to grow. The cost has continued to grow. There was significant reporting yesterday that other nations are encouraging the United States to continue this war. The reporting yesterday was that Saudi Arabia is encouraging the United States to continue this war. The reporting last week was that Israel is encouraging the United States to continue this war. Israel and Saudi Arabia are sovereign nations that have the right to make their own decisions for their own people, but they don't have the right to suggest what is the right course for the United States. We have very different interests--we have very, very different interests than those nations--and we should make the right decision for ourselves after consideration.

The price of oil has continued to significantly increase from last week. When I took the floor last week on Senator Booker's resolution, the price of oil had gone up $0.60 a gallon since before the war began on February 28. Now it has gone up $1.02. Just to convert that into the cost at the pump for Virginians, Virginians buy 8 million gallons of fuel at the pump every day. So, at $1 a gallon, that is $8 million that Virginians are spending for fuel every day that they weren't spending before the war. All indications by those who are experts in this area-- and I do not proclaim expertise in energy--is that the energy shock is likely to continue to drive up costs at the pump for Virginians and Americans for a very long time.

Why did the Framers set it up so that war should be debated before it is initiated?

So that you could ask questions.

What is the rationale for the war?

The President has suggested it was to obliterate a nuclear program that he claimed had been obliterated; to stop a ballistic missile program when the missiles' progress in Iran would have been years before they could have developed a missile that would have reached the United States; to change a regime; to back up Iranian protesters; maybe to control Iranian oil. We would have been able to ask questions about the rationale and get an answer rather than a shifting collection of answers that has been given.

We would have been able to ask questions about: What are your plans to minimize harm to civilians? We have already seen tragedies with respect to harm to civilians.

What are your plans to protect allies who, if Iran is attacked, are likely to face retaliatory attacks from Iran?

Many of our allies were not prepared to face what Iran did because the United States did not consult with them.

Just to use one item in this that would clearly have been a discussion if the administration had done what the Constitution requires and come to Congress: What about the Strait of Hormuz where massive percentages of the world's energy and critical minerals-- fertilizer and other byproducts--come through the Strait? What is the plan for that?

What is the plan to make sure that the Strait is not choked off in a way that hurts everyday American families and the entire global economy?

I mean, this is not an unforeseen problem. The British closed off the Strait of Hormuz in the early 1950s to punish Iran. The Shah of Iran threatened that many times during the war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s. As those two nations were fighting, tankers were hit in ways that often shut down the Strait of Hormuz. So the Strait of Hormuz being shut down and then having a massive effect on the global economy was an absolutely known and completely foreseeable consequence of a war in the region.

And yet in the last week, the reporting of this is that either-- either--the White House didn't consider it or the White House was warned by military officials that this could happen and it would hurt the United States and others--a warning that they ignored.

Now, either of those options is bad. If they didn't consider the possibility that history demonstrated was a likelihood, that shows incredibly slipshod planning, and if they considered that possibility because it happened before and dismissed it, that also demonstrates a shocking degree of naivete.

And so we see, just in that one instance, how Virginians are being punished by paying more at the pump because of the closure of those straits. This is an entirely predictable consequence of war that didn't get an airing before the public or before the Senate, who could have asked challenging questions.

Some believe subjecting a war plan to being asked challenging questions is a burden or is a hassle or, you know, it is going to be something that we don't want to do.

No, that is exactly what should happen. Any proposal of this magnitude that is going to risk the lives of our troops should be subjected to the most searing examination that we would do of anything in this body.

And I want to conclude, because there are others who want to speak, but I will just take it back to Virginia. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Virginians are currently deployed on the USS Ford Carrier Strike Group. That was a strike group based in Norfolk that deployed in June.

When it deployed, the normal deployment for a carrier strike group is 7 months. So the expectation of all who deployed was that they would be home by the holidays; they would be home with the family by the holidays. Instead, at the end of last year, the President ordered that the deployment be extended so that the Ford that was positioned in the Middle East could come into the Caribbean or the Pacific to assist in the effort to ultimately invade Venezuela. And so they extended the deployment another 2 months.

And then the Ford was told that it needed to deploy back across the water to provide support for the invasion and the attack of Iran, and so the deployment has been extended further.

The Ford is about to set the record for the longest deployment ever, but this has a cost. The Virginians and others who are deployed with the strike group thought they were going to be home at Christmas, and now it is being extended more and more and more.

And the Ford carrier is suffering significant maintenance challenges that threaten the actual lives of those on board. First, it was threatening quality of life with problems with the toilet systems and other onboard systems on the carrier, which are not hard to predict when you run a carrier at a much greater length than was planned for the original deployment, and these affected basic quality of life and morale.

But it got more serious. Last week, we learned that a fire started at the laundry facilities on the Ford that took 30 hours to put out, and 200 sailors on the Ford suffered smoke inhalation injuries because of that fire.

Now, recently, the Ford has been pulled out of frontline combat support activities and taken back to Crete for repairs. But, again, these sailors aren't coming home anytime soon, and that ship that was supposed to be out there for 7 months is now into the 11 months--well, I guess it would be now coming on 9 months, with more to come.

This is the kind of human cost that happens when you go into a war without a rationale or without a plan. And so what we need is a plan, I believe, to bring this to a close.

We were at war in the Middle East for 25 years, and I have yet to hear a single colleague of mine come and make a speech on the floor to suggest that those 14,000-plus American lives killed or the 65,000-plus Americans injured or the $8 trillion spent--I have yet to hear a single person come here and say that was a chapter in American life that we should be proud of.

We should have learned something from it. The first thing we should have learned is that another war in the Middle East probably makes no sense. But we certainly should have learned that, before we go into one, we have to examine it in significant detail to make sure that we are not sending our sons and daughters into harm's way for no valid reason.

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