Political Quotes

“I thank Congresswoman Tlaib for leading this conversation today. I am seeing some of my colleagues on the floor today who remember the story that I want to tell. This was the fall of 2002, and there was a vigorous debate going on whether or not we should be sending our troops to declare war on Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. The story went that there were weapons of mass destruction. Yes, we had briefings. They were in the north. They were in the south, the west, and the east. They were there all right, we were told. A vote was going to come up on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, AUMF, in Iraq. There was one voice in particular that stood out and still stands out to me, a woman who was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. Her name was Nancy Pelosi. She stood up at our meetings and said, no, there is no intelligence to justify that we go to war in Iraq. A group of us got together. I see Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the only Member who, because we were already in Afghanistan, voted against that war, who put together a group called the Out of Iraq Caucus. We went door-to-door, literally, and asked our Democratic friends in the House to say no to this war because it was not necessary. At the end of the day, even though the press story had already been written that somehow it was almost a unanimous vote, 60 percent of the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against that war in Iraq. That was over 17 years ago.…”