Political Quotes

“tomorrow this body faces an opportunity, in fact, an obligation to reassert its proper constitutional role in warmaking. I urge my colleagues to support the Udall-Kaine amendment, a provision to prohibit funding for unauthorized and unapproved military operations against Iran. No vote will be more important during this session than the one we cast tomorrow. It is not only the imminence of potential conflict, it is the reality that we would be surrendering our proper constitutional responsibility and our right if we fail to adopt this amendment. The American people already believe we have ceded too much authority to the executive branch; that we are implicitly, if not directly and explicitly, approving an imperial presence. This amendment puts us to the test before the American people. The Congress has a job to do. We should do that job tomorrow. We should insist that we have the authority and we have the obligation to consider whether there are military operations against Iran. We can talk about policy. There is no question that Iran is a malign and treacherously bad actor in that part of the world. There is no doubt that it poses a clear and present jeopardy to the world community. Iran may well have installed mines on the two tankers that were severely damaged recently and may well be the culprit in shooting down an American drone in the past week, but the United States is on a perilous course.…”