Political Quotes

“I rise today, I believe, as the penultimate speaker before we have a vote on the War Powers Resolution, a bipartisan resolution I filed with Senators Paul, Schiff, and Schumer. I rise today in support of our troops, who don't deserve to be sent into war unless this Congress votes that there should be such a war. I pray for the families who are learning that their loved ones will not come home. I pray for the families whose children or spouses are deployed overseas, unable to sleep with worry about them. Mr. President, I have paid attention over the course of the last 13 months as this President has again and again and again used our troops to carry out military action without coming to Congress. I have paid attention to the reasons that my colleagues are giving who want to give the President an E-ZPass around the Constitution. When we had a vote last summer about the attack on Iran at the end of the Israeli 12-day war, by the time the vote had been called up, that bombing mission was in the rearview mirror, and so my colleague from Idaho said: There are no hostilities. The hostilities are over, so you should vote against the resolution on that ground. When we called up an effort to constrain the President from illegally striking boats in international waters, the legal rationale asserted by my colleagues and the White House to vote down a War Powers Resolution and end-run the Constitution was: These are pinprick strikes that don't rise to the level of war.”