Sam Gejdenson: “Mr. Speaker, we have a choice here today; and the choice is whether we are going to denigrate the Congress to a debating…”

“Mr. Speaker, we have a choice here today; and the choice is whether we are going to denigrate the Congress to a debating society to deal with some theoretical issues about the power structure between the executive and the legislative or are we going to deal with the real lives of people on the ground who have suffered, I believe, long enough. If the Congress is serious about exercising its war powers, then it ought to move to bring the troops out of there immediately, and the 20 other countries where American troops are today preventing death and destruction, preventing the kind of carnage we saw for all too long without any worldwide action in Bosnia. My parents are survivors of the Holocaust, and one of the things that I think troubled me more than anything else were all of the great conferences that went on debating the niceties of international diplomacy. In a sense, if this Congress wanted to take an action against Bosnia, against our presence there that has ended the death of children and women on a daily basis, then we should have voted to pull the troops out.”