Iran

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I don't have written remarks for this, but I have been stunned that we here in this Nation are at war. We are unequivocally at war.

And I did write down what I have heard from leaders. Let me quote, on March 9, the President of the United States said:

[T]he war is very complete, pretty much.

On April 7, the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, our former colleague here in the Senate, said:

[V]ery shortly, this war is going to conclude.

On April 8, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary, said we had ``achieved every single objective on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from day one.''

In June, Secretary Rubio came to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, upon which I sit, and testified under oath declaring that ``the war is over.''

Yet that same day, we had kinetic exchanges with Iran. June 18, Donald Trump said the United States had ``defeated'' Iran ``totally militarily'' and that the memorandum of understanding ``probably is unconditional surrender.''

Let's fast-forward to July 14: Missiles and drones are still flying. The war is still raging. The President has achieved none of the goals.

I know what has happened though is that we lifted sanctions on Iran. They got billions of dollars of oil sales done. We have seen the greatest energy crisis in my lifetime upending global oil markets, but more important to me, seeing people's gas prices go up but not only their gas prices, what have we seen? We have seen that everything that touches that fuel source, the transportation of goods and services, has made prices go up for families all across our country.

I have seen the suffering, not just of the American people with higher costs but American military who are being held over and over and over, put in harm's way, hundreds injured, 14 dead, and what have we achieved? The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The President said that he wanted to deal with the highly enriched material. It is still in country. The President said he wanted regime change. We have a more extreme regime. The President said he was going to get unconditional surrender. They have not unconditionally surrendered. They are firing at our soldiers right now.

Every goal he laid out for a war that he did not come to Congress, as the Constitution says--everything he laid out has not been achieved.

And even the memorandum of understanding that he said was so great had so many holes of Swiss cheese that it fell apart, and here we are back at war.

And what is the President's plan? Can one Senator here say, tell us, what the President of the United States is trying to achieve as we spend billions and billions of dollars a day, a week, in this conflict?

What is he trying to achieve right now? Nobody knows the plan. This is ``deja vu all over again,'' as the great New Jerseyan, Yogi Berra said. This is yet another quagmire in the Middle East with no plan, with no strategy, with no clear objectives, with Americans putting their lives on the line.

And what are we doing here in this body? Nothing. We are going on this week as if this is business as usual. A bunch of us are trying to force more oversight votes or--excuse me--war powers votes.

But this body is doing nothing as a President is spending billions of taxpayer dollars, upending our national economy, putting lives at risk in a war that has achieved nothing but made things worse with the Strait of Hormuz closed.

And what are we doing, Congress? Nothing to check a President that is clearly out of control, who is clearly out of his depth, who is clearly not the great dealmaker because he failed in making deals with Iran before this deal and--even though he claimed to have one--it clearly fell apart.

We have war powers. The Constitution is clear. Yet, you are letting him for month after month after month--since February--conduct a war that is depleting our military reserves, coming at a great cost and sacrifice to military members and their families, and every American is paying the price for it in their everyday costs.

This is outrageous. This is unacceptable. And this body is trying to normalize this: Oh, just another day in America. Well, no, we are at war right now, and we have an obligation to either stand up and vote in favor of that war or stop it.

This is one of the most unimaginable, dystopic realities we are in right now, where the very body that has the power to declare war is not doing anything and letting this President continue to get us into a quagmire. And now he can't even tell us why we are in it, what he is trying to achieve. He is desperately scrambling to get the Strait of Hormuz open, which was open before he started this war.

This would be funny if it wasn't so tragic, if it wasn't costing so many lives, if it wasn't costing so much of our taxpayers moneys, and if so many Americans weren't hurting as a result of it. Come on, now.

How could we be complicit in this unjust war that has no clear objectives and that nobody could articulate a strategy to achieve any objective or get us out, conducted by a President who has lost all authority as our Commander in Chief because of his blunder and mistake and lack of strategy and lack of forethought?

And the very body that was put in place to provide checks and balances, to provide oversight, to hold on jealously, as our Founders said, to the powers assigned to this body, we are doing nothing but surrendering.

And I am not going to surrender on this. I am not going to let this be normalized. This is wrong, what we are doing. This is wrong in every way you look at it. It is a folly. It is a disaster. It is a failure.

And all we need is the majority of this body to say enough, that we are going to hold hearings, that we are going to do investigations, that we are going to bring the leadership of the executive branch here to sit before the American public and explain these months--this 6 months of this war--what it has truly cost us, what we have lost, and how we are going to exit. It just makes sense, but I am seeing none of that.

I am going to yield the floor, but I am going to, again, ask this body to do its job, to create a democracy people can rely on, to end the suffering of the American people, to stop this heinous cost of a war with no strategy, no clear objectives, no reason, that is unconstitutional.

Thank you.

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