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I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich from Ohio's 10th District.
Welcome to the show, Congressman.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
So, there's been so much going on in the House of Representatives, a fight over foreign policy we've wanted to see for years and years.
Finally, it's taking place there.
And now, the way I understand it, you had a resolution that said, out of Libya now.
And that one didn't pass.
But on the second try, Brad Sherman's bill that defunds the Libya war actually did pass the House of Representatives.
Is that right?
Well, Brad had an amendment that would establish certain circumstances under which funding would not be permitted.
And I think that what we've done here is we've set the stage for, as you say, a debate that has not been obtained here for many, many years.
And that is a debate over under what circumstances and under whose authority Congress goes to war.
Or the United States goes to war.
Well now, and so, you know, obviously counting on the leadership of Congress to do the right thing quickly is not your style.
You've gone ahead and led a group of congressmen and I think some senators too, right?
In filing this lawsuit, trying to get the court to put an injunction on Obama's use of military power in Libya.
Is that right?
I've been part of a bipartisan coalition of members of the House, ten members, who filed suit in federal court yesterday seeking to declare the action that was taken in Libya as illegal in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
And asking the court to to essentially order the president to stop violating the Constitution.
And we're saying that after the declaration of war from Congress that the war is unconstitutional.
And also we're asking for a declaration that that says that the policy that the president may unilaterally extend the North Atlantic Treaty to cover combat operations against a country that has not attacked a NATO country, that that would be unconstitutional.
And saying that unconstitutional to extend combat with NATO without satisfying the constitutional process of the United States.
And so we are trying to...
We're seeking injunctive relief to end all the violations.
And it includes, but isn't limited to, suspending military operations in Libya after the declaration of war from Congress.
Now, how confident are you that the courts will take this up?
It sort of sounds to me like the kind of thing where they'll say, hey, if you don't like it, impeach him.
But it's not up to us on this.
Well, you know, in the past, courts have not been willing to take up this issue.
But what's different now is that we feel that the issue that we brought forward is one that goes beyond the political questions, which courts have shown a reluctance to get into before.
We are crafting this lawsuit along very narrow constitutional lines that raise questions as to what's the real meaning of Article I, Section 8 when it says that there shall be...that the Congress shall have the power to declare war.
How can a plain reading of that result in an administration going forward with a war without checking with Congress, without having congressional approval?
So, you know, in the past, Congress has said, look, cut off the funds if you want to.
There's your power.
But that still doesn't deal with the plain reading of Article I, Section 8, which talks about who has the power to declare war in the first place.
So, you know, these are issues that we're dealing with at this moment, and I think that we're very close to a condition where the courts, if the court decides to give a standing, could be creating an opportunity for a rebalancing of our system, which has become imbalanced through a number of presidents arrogating to themselves the war power.
Well, you know, I thought it was interesting, and it must have got at least some sort of dark chuckle out of you there, when the Obama administration made their argument that under the War Powers Resolution, they're not violating it, not because Obama has inherent plenary authority to create foreign policy as president, or the War Powers Resolution is poorly worded and therefore unconstitutional, doesn't apply to him, or something like that.
He said, no, this isn't a war.
This is France and Britain fighting a war, not us, so it doesn't count, he said.
Well, we launched over 200 cruise missiles against Libya.
We have flown over 2,000 sorties, many of which involve dropping of bombs.
Now, if someone launched a couple hundred cruise missiles at the United States and sent thousands of planes in the air with bombs and dropped them on our cities, I think that we would believe that would be a war.
And we went to war with Iraq over the threat that he would one day fly unmanned vehicles over our country and use them to drop things on us, bombs or terms.
Well, there you have it.
We are in a situation where there's an almost Orwellian inversion of meaning, where we're being told that something that's plainly a war is not, where they try to reword it to hostilities, kinetic action.
But I prefer Barack Obama, who in 2007, speaking as a senator and a constitutional law professor, said that the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an act or imminent threat to the nation.
I know President Obama may have a different opinion today, but the Constitution hasn't changed.
And so I think that our stand in Congress, which is a bipartisan stand, is to defend the Constitution, to defend the principles of the Constitution, and to stop an irrigation of power to the executive, which is absolutely contrary and adverse to the letter and the spirit of the founders who wanted to keep that war power separate.
And it becomes even more important now when you see conflicts building in Yemen and in Syria and Sudan.
You know, we're not a global cop, and nobody died and left as king of the world.
We cannot have any kind of a domestic agenda if we squander the resource of this country on wars all around the world and somehow pretend that we're making America safer.
We're not.
Well, now, I'm sure other Democrats must bring up Rwanda and that kind of thing and say, but, Congressman, sometimes we have to intervene in order to help the people.
Obama said in this case that Gaddafi would kill everyone in the town of Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte, North Carolina, he said.
Well, you know what?
To launch a war based on something that somebody said, as opposed to something that somebody did, is a new standard that could cause us to be in even more wars than we're already embroiled in now.
We have to start asking ourselves, what is prudent for us to do in a point where there's conflict that appears to be present?
Is the only solution a military strike, or does that make things worse?
And I don't think that those questions were asked.
There was an immediate attempt to organize the community of the world to make a military strike against Gaddafi.
And the reason for the intervention, protecting civilians, soon became a regime change.
And then it morphed into an active policy of assassination against Gaddafi.
This is not right.
And it's lacking in integrity, and it's lacking in common sense.
We can't continue to act as though we have the right to determine who the leader of any nation should be.
Well, we may have a right in peace in the region.
We don't achieve peace through war.
And we are, in effect, causing the United Nations to be undermined with this war.
We've put NATO in the ascendancy to where it has become a very punitive global cop that stumbles across the international landscape, leaving a trail of carnage behind it, a lot of innocent dead civilians with no accountability to anyone.
We're bankrupting our country with these wars.
This is a time for us to start asking some serious questions about what is the appropriate role for America and the world, and what is our appropriate responsibility for people here at home.
I think we've reached a point where the archaic nature of war itself is laid bare, and that we've been administering 19th century solutions for the 21st century, which has a much more developed sense of how you solve conflict.
Now, you mentioned before the bipartisan nature of the opposition to this policy in Congress, and this brand new group of what the Wall Street Journal deridingly called the Kucinich Republicans.
You had, what, dozens and dozens of Republicans support your bill and the Sherman bill, and even got John Boehner, he of worshipping executive power, to warn the President that he's in violation of the War Powers Act.
This is a party that in 2002, only five of them voted against the Iraq War resolution.
Well, I think what's changing is that there's more of a sensitivity to constitutional issues, and also there's a question of what the cost of these wars are.
You know, if there's a great concern about the cost of things here today in Washington that may not have existed ten years ago, that's good, because people are starting to do true cost accounting of a war.
If you read Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Billman's book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, true cost accounting of the war in Iraq takes them into trillions of dollars, and the war in Afghanistan, which is over half a trillion now, will probably go into trillions.
We have to decide what do we want to do as a nation.
Do we want to go on a war path?
We can become a fearful juggernaut, and also be broke here at home, at massive unemployment, ill-educated children, people without health care, people without retirement security, and an environment that's foul, and America slipping economically in a world.
But we can sure have a powerful military.
Well, you know what?
We can protect our nation, and at the same time defend it from falling, from decay from the inside by turning attention to a domestic agenda, playing an appropriate role in a world that doesn't involve being a global cop, and taming this impulse towards aggression.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time, Congressman.
I really appreciate it.
I hope we can do it again soon.
Thank you.
Bye.
Everybody, that's Congressman Dennis Kucinich from Ohio.
Democratic peace, Nick, in the U.S. House of Representatives.
