Political Quotes

“Members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives face many votes on many subjects. Most of them you vote on and forget very quickly. There are some you will never forget. At least two votes that I cast here 18 years ago are on that list in terms of my Senate service. It was 18 years ago, and just shortly after the 9/11 attack in 2001, in which 3,000 innocent Americans lost their lives. President George W. Bush came to Congress and asked for authority under our Constitution to wage a war--in fact, to wage two wars. He wanted authority from the U.S. Senate and Congress to invade Iraq and to invade Afghanistan. There was a long debate leading up to it about why it would be necessary for us to start a war with those two nations. In the case of Iraq, the argument was made that Saddam Hussein, their leader, had weapons of mass destruction that were dangerous to the region and, ultimately, dangerous to the United States. He was a tyrant and everyone knew it, but those threats were the ones that led many people to conclude that the invasion of Iraq was necessary. I disagreed. We cast that vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and 23 of us voted no--1 Republican and 22 Democrats. It turned out, after we invaded Iraq and took a close look, there were no weapons of mass destruction. The real basis for the war did not exist. Eighteen years later, having lost almost 5,000 American lives and spent trillions of dollars, we are still in Iraq.…”