Tim Kaine: “to my colleague from Indiana, I am so glad to be on the floor with you as we approach a most historic vote, a vote that…”

“to my colleague from Indiana, I am so glad to be on the floor with you as we approach a most historic vote, a vote that has not been conducted in the Senate since 1971, a vote to repeal a war authorization. We will start the first procedural steps to formerly end the Iraq war. Right now, we still have not one but two active war authorizations against the Government of Iraq that is no longer an enemy, but, in the Biblical phrase, we have beaten the sword into a plowshare. Iraq is now a strategic partner of the United States. The bill that Senator Young and I have worked on in close coordination with other colleagues would repeal both authorizations. It is a clean and simple bill, barely a page long. It has attracted bipartisan support, as my colleague mentioned, not only in the Senate and House but from stakeholder groups who care about Americans' military national security and the health and fate of our troops and veterans and their families. It is a very, very broad ideological spectrum of America that support this bill. It is a rare coalition, and it speaks to how painfully evident it is that the repeal of these authorizations is long, long overdue. This Sunday, March 19, marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2002. That war ended 12 years ago. The Persian Gulf war of 1991, Operation Desert Storm, ended 30 years ago.…”