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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's for dummies.
The Scott Horton show taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun when the president does it.
That means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of arms in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys introducing Congressman Walter Jones, representing, I guess, District three in North Carolina there.
Welcome back to the show.
Walter, how are you doing, sir?
Well, Scott, thank you very much.
Yes, it is the third district of North Carolina.
Thank you.
Good deal.
All right.
Now, listen, for people not familiar, Walter Jones, he used to be Freedom Fries Jones.
Remember that?
It was darn French obstructing our Iraq war.
And then he had a huge change of heart and he's become a virtual Ron Paul up there leading the Liberty Republicans against not just the next war, but the current terror wars spread all across Eurasia at this point.
And most particularly recently, you've been fighting to end at least half of the war in Yemen.
And I know there's been some trouble.
We've got everybody all riled up, calling their congressman to help support H. Con Res 81.
And it's been tripped up.
But I guess tell us everything you can about the effort and where it stands now, if you could, sir.
Well, I'm a co-sponsor, and I'm very happy to be on with the congressman from California, because I'll tell you the truth.
Scott, it's just one more example.
Prior to this interview, I went on the floor and mentioned the four army fellows who were killed in Nigeria about five weeks ago.
And the fact that we've got troops all around the world and most of the members of Congress don't know where they are until they read in the paper that a soldier or a Marine's been killed, and that's no way for Congress.
I mean, we have a constitutional responsibility.
I called on the speaker today as I finished my five-minute comments to let us have a debate specifically on Afghanistan.
I mentioned we've been there 16 years.
We spent well over a trillion dollars, and we've had over 2,300 Americans killed, over 20,000 wounded, and we have no debate.
And now we're talking about Yemen, now we're talking about Africa, and it just continues to go.
And I blame Speaker Ryan, quite frankly.
He's the Speaker of the House.
He has the authority to authorize and encourage a committee of jurisdiction to have a hearing and a debate on a new AUML, Authorization of Military Force.
And we don't do it.
I don't understand it.
And, you know, when you keep hearing that we had another American killed in Afghanistan a week ago, but that hardly makes the news anymore.
That's why I'm glad to be on your show.
I know we're talking about Yemen, but the point is, wherever we get involved, I mean, why are we selling planes and ammunition to the Saudis?
I mean, why are we getting involved in everybody else's wars?
I am like Ron Paul.
I want to tell you that you just get, we have a constitutional responsibility that Madison was very clear.
I'm going to paraphrase Scott very quickly.
It is the legislative branch, not the executive branch, but the legislative branch that will debate and declare war.
And so we have abdicated, talking about Congress now, the House, our authority to the executive branch.
This has nothing to do with whether it's a Republican or Democrat in the White House, but we are not meeting our constitutional responsibility.
And I am very upset by it.
I, quite frankly, would love to have, which I don't have the money, to go to the federal courts and challenge the fact that members of Congress are being denied their constitutional duty to debate the most important issue ever facing Congress is the vote to send a young man or woman to die for this country.
And we don't do it.
Well, now, I mean, the AUMF passed after September 11th, obviously has been interpreted so broadly here, but specifically on the Yemen point, we can go back to Afghanistan and the rest of it in a second, but specifically on the Yemen point, more than half of that war, really, there are two wars, there is a war against al-Qaeda and ISIS in the south of the country, special operations forces and CIA drones there are best reported information in the public sphere there.
But also we're helping the Saudis, as you said, wage this war against the Houthis and their alliance with Saleh, the former American backed dictator there.
And this part of the war is actually for al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And I think that was what you guys were going for with this age.
Conrays 81, right, was to say that you can't even pretend that this is covered by the AUMF passed after September 11th, when this is actually helping, right, just like George Bush, he did get a separate resolution for Iraq.
Obama actually didn't for Libya, but he didn't pretend that the previous AUMF justified it because he was fighting for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia.
And that one, too, wouldn't make sense to cite the anti-al-Qaeda AUMF, right?
Scott, that's exactly right.
When Mr. Congressman Kahana came to talk to me about this, I told him, absolutely.
I said, I am so frustrated that we have relationships, military relationships around the world.
And too many times, the Congress is out of touch as to what is going on.
And that, again, is what happened in Africa.
You saw McCain, you saw Graham say, well, we didn't know we had troops there.
Well, we had 700, 800 troops, I think, and the French have a much larger contingency of military there.
So it's almost like we are being left out and not demanding our responsibility.
Now, my friend Sheldon Richman made a really good point here about what happened with the Rules Committee here on this H. Con Res 81, where the Rules Committee, in their words, I forgot which one of them, their spokesman or whoever had said, well, they decided that the war in Yemen or whatever level of American participation in Saudi's and UAE's war in Yemen doesn't, I think, quote, rise to the level of the War Powers Act.
But as Sheldon was pointing out, that means that the War Powers Act might as not have any text in it at all.
If the Rules Committee can decide whether something counts as applying under it or not, that would, you would think, be part of the vote and the debate under the War Powers Act.
But instead, they can say whether something is kinetic enough to rise to the level of something that the law would apply to, even though it's widely reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal, that America is responsible, as you said, for selling bombs, but also all the care and feeding of the Saudis' airplanes.
Our AWACS control the airspace.
Our fueling tankers refuel their planes on the way to their targets.
Our Navy helps enforce the blockade.
What the hell?
We got to drop an A-bomb on them for it to rise to the level of the War Powers Act applying to it, sir?
Scott, that is the dishonesty of Washington, the example you just gave.
The Rules Committee is nothing but a puppet group from the Speaker of the House who now is a Republican named Paul Ryan.
Pete Sessions is the chairman.
I like him fine, but they do exactly what they want to do, and in my opinion, they're violating our constitutional responsibilities of members of the House.
And they can say, well, we interpret the rule this way, and therefore it doesn't apply to the war powers.
And it's just hogwash, to be honest with you.
And we ought not even have a question about our constitutional responsibility.
And whether you have a soldier in Yemen or not is immaterial.
You are spending money, the taxpayers' money, and selling these weapons to Saudi Arabia, who they were behind 9-11.
They brought down the towers and hit the Pentagon, and the plane crashed in Pennsylvania.
To me, I don't see much difference in the Saudis and the Iranians, to be honest with you.
So here we are, complicit with the Saudis in Yemen.
And you know, the way I look at this, I'm like a Ron Paul.
If they can't put their troops out there and fight independently, so be it.
Why is it always America's responsibility?
We can't even pay our bills in this country.
We're over $20 trillion in debt.
We're in the worst financial situation I've seen.
I'm not talking about the jobs, I'm talking about the debt of this nation.
And it grows by the second.
We're spending over $250 million per day around this world, helping and fighting wars.
How much longer does that go before it collapses?
I don't know.
All right, hang on just one second.
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How do you like that?
Well, Congressman, the news reports about H-Con Res being killed said that, well, there was a sort of compromise.
Were they going to let y'all debate and vote on a non-binding resolution?
And I guess I got to say that I never was really hopeful, or hopeful, but never optimistic that H-Con Res 81 would have passed, even if they had ever let it get to the House floor like they were supposed to have to there.
But I was thinking, well, hey, at least we'll have a really great day on C-SPAN 2 where Walter Jones and the boys get up there and tell the truth about the Yemen war on TV for a minute.
At least we'll have that debate, and maybe that will help kind of move the ball forward.
So are we still going to get that?
Are you guys going to have a chance to debate this on C-SPAN for us?
I think that the Democratic leadership has talked to the rules committee and probably the Speaker's House and Representative Kahana will get a chance to have a debate on the floor.
But as you said, what really angers me is non-binding.
But that's the way this place works.
Until the American people—and I won't be here, I'm sure—see the reason to get the money out of politics, get the money out of policy, we will never change anything.
And that's the sad thing for me to say.
I've been here 22 years, but the longer I've been here, the more decisions I've seen that have been influenced by who's paying the bills.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in this war—I know you're familiar with this, sir—that this is the poorest country in the Middle East, which is a pretty poor region already, you know, outside of UAE and Kuwait.
But listen, I'm sorry to say here, I know I'm supposed to be interviewing you, but I've been talking with Claire Minera from Doctors Without Borders from there in Yemen for about the last six months here.
And she told me in March that I believe then it was 30,000 people had cholera.
And then she told me a couple of months later that 30,000 was 300,000.
And now in November, by now, I mean, even last month, it was 700,000 people have cholera.
And as she explained, this is lethal, especially for the very young and the very old and sick.
It's children who are dying of this.
And it's an easily treatable and curable disease.
Really, you don't even need antibiotics.
You just need fluids.
But what happens is through diarrhea and vomiting, these babies dehydrate to death.
And this is what we are doing to them.
And for what, and this is, I'll make sure and send to your staff, I have it.
The link to the New York Times article, I sure would love to see you read this on the House floor, where the Obama administration told the New York Times, this wasn't a scoop, they told them, they said, well, we knew that if we launched this war, it would have a quote, indeterminate ending.
But they said we needed to placate the Saudis after signing the Iran nuclear deal, which actually preserved Saudi security interests by scaling back the Iranian civilian nuclear program even further.
And anyway, so this is the worst thing going on in the world right now.
And it's us doing it.
Well, Scott, to that point, I mean, when I look, I gave you the issue of spending $250 million a day to fight around the world.
But for 16 years, that's what the average has been.
How about taking $250 million and help the doctors fight cholera?
I mean, we need a new direction for this country.
We continue to go bankrupt, we're not going to be the world power.
The world power can pay its own bills without raising the debt ceiling every December.
So they can borrow more money to pay the debt from last year.
Somebody's got to get in the White House that fully understands that America's greatness is that America stands on its own legs, financially speaking, without having to borrow money to pay the bills.
And all that weapons that we are using, the drones, and you kill somebody in another country, and you kill the bad guy, but you hurt 10 of the innocent people.
And those people remember for the next 100 years that America sent a drone over and killed my grandfather, who was a good, decent guy.
I don't know.
It's just, we just don't.
But see, it all comes back to your point and what you were saying when we started this conversation.
Congress is not doing its duty based on the Constitution.
Yeah.
Well, we could apply that to a lot of things, but it sure goes for the world empire.
Yep.
Well, now, so you brought up Afghanistan there, and I wrote a book about this.
And actually, I heard a rumor that someone was dropping one off for you there at your office.
I don't know if you saw it, Fool's Errand.
Did you get that?
Yeah, I do.
And I'm taking home during the Thanksgiving to start reading it.
Oh, great.
Well, I sure hope you like it.
But so, yeah, it's the longest foreign war, as you know.
It's going nowhere fast.
Obviously, it's worse going backwards.
And yet, this is the big hang up.
A friend of mine told me he goes around Washington, D.C., talking to everybody about this as much as he can.
We've got to get out of Afghanistan.
And they all say one thing, the same thing.
And that is, yeah, but a safe haven myth, Al Qaeda will come back.
And from there, they'll be able to attack us.
And it seems like, you know, that's the narrative everyone's glommed onto, this safe haven myth.
But the argument against it, that Afghanistan is the far side of Earth from everywhere, it provides no special access to the United States, it's the furthest safe haven.
That kind of argument never really seems to seep through.
I just wonder if there's a way, have you ever had any success talking with congressmen, other Republican congressmen, and being able to break through that particular narrative that we have to stay in Afghanistan essentially forever, or else something bad might happen from there at some point?
Scott, I reminded, I'm getting to a point, I reminded Mr. Trump in a letter I sent him on July the 14th, I'll get Allison to send it to you, that he had made 30 statements, and I'm sure tweets as well, about how fruitless and wasteful was it to be in Afghanistan.
In the letter I wrote him on July the 14th, I used four of his quotes, and then I closed with a, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Chuck Kulak, has been my unofficial advisor on Afghanistan, and he doesn't think, and I used what he said in the letter to President Trump, Afghanistan is unwinnable.
But yet we're going to keep spending billions and trillions of dollars over there, wasting the taxpayers' money.
And yet, Scott, the problem is, the problem is, if you think about the Vietnam War and the excellent program that Ken Burns and Len Novak did recently, what was, what changed the Vietnam War?
The protests.
The people got upset.
I'm not talking about protests, or burning down buildings, or anything else, but the problem is, without the draft, there are only a few of us who think about what's going on.
The majority of the leadership here in Washington, they're all consumed with tax policy.
I went on the floor today, in 2008, Ms. Pelosi was the Speaker of the House, I went to her staff and asked her, the staff to ask her, would she consider once a month, herself, not a member of Congress, but herself, being in the chair the first Tuesday of every month, and say, we're going to have a moment of silence for our men and women who've been killed in combat and their families.
And she kept her word.
She did it.
We haven't even done that since.
The Speaker of the House is in line to be the President of the United States, and to me, it was proper that the Speaker of the House, who's got that responsibility, should be the one that makes the announcement, or request a moment of silence.
We don't want to do that anymore.
I think it's, maybe it's like you said about, they won't allow a vote on a new AUMF.
They're afraid they won't win.
They're afraid that if they honor the dead soldiers every week, that'll, you know, they don't show us the Dover pictures anymore, but maybe that would start sinking through, getting to somebody, getting to members of Congress themselves, and maybe helping some of them have a change of heart the way that you did.
Well, I'll tell you the truth.
I read the, Bob Schieff, in 2010, did an editorial on Face the Nation that talked about a woman sitting in an airport, and how sad she looked, and he didn't want to stare, but he, as he looked over, he saw that she had a triangle folded flag in a plastic case.
He made, it's a beautiful editorial that he did, and I read it word for word today on the floor to honor the four soldiers, and the one soldier killed in Afghanistan.
It just, that's why I wanted to be on the show.
The American people have got to let their voices be heard, and get, if your son or daughter's not over there, start worrying about somebody else's son and daughter being killed.
We need to get the American people behind this thing.
Congressman, may I offer one word of criticism here?
Sure.
You know, I think you've done such a great job here, but one area where, and listen, far be it from me to, I'm not claiming I, you know, am able to keep up with every word you pronounce or anything, but it seems like you always invoke the dead American soldiers, but never the dead innocent civilians in these wars.
Millions now, at least a million, since George Bush invaded Iraq with the consequences for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria.
We're talking at minimum hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose lives have been, you know, extinguished and or completely destroyed by American foreign policy.
If the American people don't care about their own children who wear a uniform being killed, they're not going to care about some other country's innocent people being killed.
That's probably true too.
I mean, I hate to be so callous, but I'm telling you the truth.
Yeah.
And they should care.
I do care.
But if I can't get my own party to debate sending an American child who's now an adult to die for this country without following the Constitution, then it's just a frustrating situation for a lot of us.
Yeah.
Well, I understand what you mean about that.
And, you know, as far as the draft, I mean, there's got to be a better way to get through this.
There's actually was a recent debate in the American Conservative magazine on this issue about how, you know, after all, 60,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam before the draft and the protests finally were the end of the thing.
And you supply the Army and the Marine Corps with millions of of new infantry to use as cannon fodder.
They'll use them.
It might take a decade for that to create enough backlash.
And plus, you know, it wouldn't be worth it to conscript and violate the rights of of all those people anyway, force them to kill and die in order to provoke their parents to react or their brothers and sisters to react.
There's got to be a better way to to do something.
And I know you're in the House of Representatives, and I hear how powerless you feel about this.
But what can we do?
Well, I think, again, at some point in time, I get something I said just a few minutes ago.
I'm hopeful that maybe at some point in time, there'll be a constitutional lawyer somewhere in America that feels that Congress is not doing its constitutional duty and will encourage Congress to go to the federal courts and let the federal courts tell Congress, you have a responsibility, you have an open office, and your responsibility is the greatest responsibility you have as a member of Congress is to send an American to die.
Yeah, well, and that's the thing.
Hey, tell me this.
I interviewed this lady.
She was from a pressure group, Yemen, Peace in Yemen Now or something.
I'm sorry.
She's trying to help.
Kate Kaiser is her name.
I'm sorry.
I forget the name of her group.
But she was working really hard on talking to all the congressional staff about H.
Con Res 81 here on Yemen.
And I talked to her and and I gave her like the devil's advocate argument that nobody cares what we say.
What if we do call Congress?
What are they going to do about it?
And I guess ultimately, I was sort of proven right.
They did kill the thing.
But she was saying that no, really, when people call their congressmen, and if they get a bunch of calls in a few days saying, hey, we really, really care about what's going on in Yemen, that that really does make a difference, at least on the margin.
It's worthwhile.
It's something.
What where do you fall on a scale of one to 10 between that and forget it until we get the money out of Congress?
Where do you fall?
I would give it a five.
And I'll tell you why we John Gary Mende and I, four or five months ago, put in a House resolution asking for a debate on Afghanistan.
And we had a pretty good bill and bipartisan.
And I think we got 11 people on it.
I think we got 11 people on it.
And just like Rand Paul, and I'm sorry he was attacked by his neighbor.
But he had an AUMF in the Senate about a month ago.
And the leadership of the Republican Party in the Senate tabled the AUMF.
And he got 35 votes.
And of the 35, three were Republican, and the rest were Democrats.
It's just at some point in time, there's going to be a president that will keep his word, which Mr. Trump did not, on staying in Afghanistan.
And so at some point in time, there's going to be a president strong enough that the American people will trust.
And he will start saying, we need a strong military, but we don't need a foreign policy, that we don't know what in the world we're doing.
And that's where we are again.
Yeah.
Well, especially when we have Republicans in power, it's almost useless to come at them from the left.
I mean, what you're doing is the most important thing, being as conservative as a conservative Republican congressman from North Carolina can be.
And that's why you're anti-war.
You're not anti-war in spite of that.
That's the reason why you are.
I know you've explained this before.
I don't mean to just put words in your mouth, but we've talked about this, your faith and all of these things and the role that that's played in your evolving point of view on these issues.
So, I mean, that really sets the standard.
That's what Ron Paul accomplished with his presidential runs was saying, you can, if you like your identity, you can keep it.
We just need you to change your position on this.
And after all, as I know, you know, probably better than any of us, Congressman, is we've got combat veterans who've come home from these wars who agree with you.
And it's not that they're wearing tie dye and it's the summer of love or anything like that.
They're still right wing conservative Republican voter types.
Many of them supported Trump because of the anti-war things he said.
Right.
Yeah.
So this is the movement that we've got to organize and that we've got to get making noise.
But anyway, I'm sorry I've kept you so long.
Thank you so much for coming back.
Thank you.
And always know I'm there with you because I agree with you.
We need to follow the Constitution if we're going to send our men and women around the world to die.
All right.
Thank you so much.
I sure appreciate you.
That is Walter Jones.
He represents the third district in North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives.
