Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys on the line.
I got Robert Naiman from Just Foreign Policy.
That is justforeignpolicy.org.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
Hey, man, so there's all kinds of stuff going on on Capitol Hill regarding the war in Yemen, which is amazing to me since essentially hardly anyone in America knows anything about it or cares.
For some reason, a few senators because of the activism of a few like yourself, a few senators and a few congressmen have really taken the lead on this.
And historically, they've passed War Powers Act resolutions in the House and the Senate demanding an end to this thing.
But it ain't over yet.
So I guess pick up where we left off, Bob.
What's the deal?
Well, we're at a spectacular juncture right now, which is that, as you said, both houses have passed something, but they haven't passed the same thing.
And so it hasn't gotten to Trump's desk yet.
And this isn't an accident.
This is sabotage.
So in December, the Senate passed the Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee, Chris Murphy resolution.
The House blocked it.
Then Speaker Paul Ryan blocked the vote with the help of some Democrats.
We could have won then if we could have got a vote because there are a bunch of Republicans that supported it together with all Democrats.
But there was insider skullduggery.
So they come back, new Congress, Senate.
So first they go to the House first, right?
And now supposedly Democrats control the House, so we should be able to get a clean vote.
But mischief happened when House Republicans, some House Republicans, moved to add this non-germane, non-relevant language on anti-Semitism to the bill, which at first a bunch of people thought, well, OK, fine.
We're against anti-Semitism.
Yay.
Why not?
But what that did was it messed up the bill for the Senate.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled that this is not germane, and therefore this bill is no longer privileged under the War Powers Resolution, and therefore the senators can't force a vote.
Mitch McConnell can block it.
The key point of invoking the War Powers Resolution is to be able to force a vote regardless of what the leadership says.
So this maneuver of adding this language on anti-Semitism to the M and War Powers bill while advertised as harmless actually was lethal.
So the Senate, the senators said, OK, back to the drawing board.
We're going to pass our clean Senate bill.
And that's what they did in March.
So you see, we already had four months of delays with the shenanigans.
And now the House still hasn't passed the bill, and the latest report from the Hill was, as of a couple days ago, we expected a vote next week.
But the Republicans are again threatening to add this language in anti-Semitism, which would again derail the bill.
And the latest report from yesterday was that therefore the vote is going to be postponed because people are not confident that they've figured out how to stop the sabotage, particularly right after the AIPAC conference just happened.
So this spectacular nightmare has come true of this convergence between AIPAC and the Saudi regime, between the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby.
The Israel lobby is saving the bacon of the Saudi lobby just when we're about to finally beat the Saudi lobby on this unconstitutional war in Yemen, worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world, nothing to do with protecting Americans, quite the opposite.
The war is helping al-Qaeda.
And in this context, after four years, suddenly at the last minute, here's AIPAC.
What's AIPAC doing here?
What's AIPAC doing defending the unconstitutional Saudi war in Yemen?
Well, apparently behind the scenes there's some kind of deal between the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby.
So it's horrible, and yet it is revelatory.
Yeah.
Well, and I wonder, do they have any real interest in Yemen, or they're just doing a favor for the Saudis?
Or do you know?
It's not that they have an interest in Yemen.
It's that they have a collaboration with the Israel lobby and the Saudi lobby have a collaboration in Washington to try to keep America fighting their war, particularly against Iran.
So they have this big narrative that Iran is the big bogey, and that's why you have to fight our war in Yemen.
That's why you have to fight our war in Syria.
That's the big excuse for everything, is the big supposed big threat from Iran.
So these two players are helping each other because they have a common interest in this narrative of the supposed terrible threat from Iran, which is the excuse for everything.
It's the excuse for wars, the excuse for military spending, the excuse for sanction.
And so that's the interest of the Israel lobby to help the Saudi lobby.
Yes, it's a favor, but it's also part of their overall strategy of, like, Iran, Iran, Iran.
That's something that they share in common as the excuse for everything.
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And in this case, they get to pretend, I guess, that the Houthis represent the Ayatollah's attempt to get a stranglehold on the Bab el-Mandeb, the gate of the Red Sea there.
But that is a strategic threat to Israel if it's not make-believe.
Yes.
Their story is that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, which they're not.
They're politically supported by Iran.
They're rhetorically supported by Iran.
It's an indigenous Yemeni group that – there was a longstanding civil conflict in Yemen before Iran had anything to do with it.
And again, as I said – and you can see this in the WikiLeaks documents of the U.S. diplomatic cable – that this has been true for years and years, that Iran is the big excuse for everything.
And privately, U.S. diplomats conceded that they didn't believe this story, that Iran – everything that Saudi Arabia doesn't like in the region is Iran's fault.
Like, Shia people in Iran are oppressed by the Saudi government.
If they have a protest, the Saudi government says, oh, it's Iran.
It's not the fact that these people object to having their human rights violated.
The unhappiness is because of Iraq.
That's the pattern for years and years.
And unfortunately, the Trump administration has doubled down, especially under Bolton and Pompeo, in this narrative that it's all about Iran.
All you have to know about the Middle East is Iran.
We're against Iran.
And therefore, you have to support whatever we say, support the Saudi war in Yemen, even though it's unconstitutional, even though it starved 85,000 Yemeni children to death.
Stay the course, because it's all about Iran.
Yeah.
Man, I'll tell you, and it's just so unfortunate that – I guess maybe it's deemed just too difficult to explain the way that every enhancement of Iranian power in the region in this century has been at the hands of the USA.
So there are no – and the Israelis.
So they're in no position to complain.
We should be able to say every time, I don't want to hear it, because every one of these hawks are the same ones who said we had to get rid of Saddam for them, the same ones who said that if we support al-Qaeda in Syria for a few years that it will hurt Iran, when instead it only bolstered their power in Syria as the Syrian state asked them to come and help defend the state from their CIA-backed enemies.
And so now they have more influence there than ever before.
And then like you're talking about in Yemen, there's this mythology that the Houthis essentially are just a branch of the Iranian state somehow or something, which in essence gives Iran credit for all of the Houthis' victories that they have virtually nothing to do with, and just enhances their stature and reputation and makes them seem like they're more powerful in the region than ever before.
But if America just stayed home, none of this would have happened.
That's true.
And it's also true that this is a longstanding pattern of the U.S. wars in the region.
There's no consequence for failure for U.S. government officials or the people that support these catastrophes.
It's just like the war in Libya, which was supposedly that was about human rights.
Did anybody look back afterwards to see if people in Libya were better off?
Are people in Syria better off because of the U.S.-Saudi intervention?
People in Iraq better off?
There's never any consequences.
So, of course, the incentive is just to make whatever lie is convenient or excuse is convenient at the time, because if the thing leads to disaster, we'll just change the channel to the next adventure without anybody being held accountable for all the horrible consequences of the last one.
Right.
And they'll always just resort to these kind of tired cliches.
Oh, they've been fighting over there for thousands of years.
George W. Bush didn't just march the entire 3rd Infantry Division on into the heart of Mesopotamia there for eight years.
You know how they are, them Arabs always squabbling.
Yes, and also the thing that we should care about most as Americans is what's our role?
What are we responsible for?
We're not responsible for all the problems in the world, but U.S. policy has been responsible for a lot of terrible things in the Middle East.
So why don't we just stop doing all the bad things, like the Hippocratic Oath, do no harm?
If we don't know how to make any improvement, and maybe it's not our business anyway, how about we just stop ruining things?
How about we just stop overthrowing other people's governments and occupying their countries and bombing them and leave them alone?
Then at least it wouldn't be our fault if they prosper.
Hooray.
They don't prosper.
A shame.
But at least it wouldn't be our fault that all these people are suffering.
After four years of this war in Yemen that was supported, participated by the United States with 85,000 Yemeni children killed, couldn't we just at least say, let's stop?
Let's stop our unconstitutional support and participation in this war?
Maybe that wouldn't solve all the problems in Yemen, but could we at least stop making it worse?
Wouldn't that be a good place to start?
Yeah.
It's such a weird place we're in in this society right now where this is just another thing.
Most people don't even know about it at all, and yet it's the worst crisis.
It's at least on par with the horror of Iraq War II or the American and Saudi-caused war in Syria.
Right now it's the worst thing taking place on the face of the earth.
It's the most powerful country in the world.
Us.
USA.
The superpower.
Number one.
And all that.
Versus the most helpless and weakest and poorest population we can find.
Other than the Somalis across the way who we've been blowing up since 2006.
That's another episode.
It's just crazy.
You know what?
Talk more about it.
When you say 85,000 children, I don't know, that's a statistic or something.
Please tell us everything you can about the reality of the humanitarian crisis going on over there.
Because I think people just don't know.
They just don't know.
Matt, I won't tell them.
So the United Nations has been saying for a long time that this is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
And nobody disputes that.
And it is the case that, I mean, it's also not really disputed in Washington.
That's why finally last December the Senate voted against this.
That the starvation, the suffering, the disease, these are not accidental fog of war things.
The Saudi government, using U.S. planes and bombs and U.S. refueling of their planes, deliberately bombed the sewage treatment plants, deliberately bombed civilian targets.
When you destroy the sewage treatment plants, you destroy access to clean water.
When you destroy access to clean water, you create cholera.
That's why Yemen has the worst cholera crisis in recorded history.
The Saudis have deliberately starved, are deliberately starving the population as part of their war strategy.
And this is not like an unknown thing.
This has been known for some time.
Unfortunately, for a long time, the U.S. media wasn't paying attention.
Congress wasn't paying attention.
Finally, Congress did pay attention.
U.S. media did pay attention.
And finally, they did, at least, you know, we had these votes in the Senate and the House to end it and add the sabotage.
They haven't voted together on the same thing.
But the Trump administration doubled down.
Trump and Pompeo, they are insisting that the status quo policy must continue.
That's how tight they are with the Saudi regime.
And unfortunately, there's been, you know, this whole Russiagate thing has been a tremendous distraction from the real scandal, which is the relationship of Trump and Jared and Pompeo to the Saudi regime.
And this super tight embrace, particularly of Jared Kushner and MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince de facto leader in Saudi Arabia.
Who launched this war when he was the deputy crown prince?
Who launched this war in March 2015 and has insisted on continuing it, backed by the United States.
And apparently, Jared Kushner was secretly advising MBS how to keep his crimes going and evade blowback from members of Congress.
So this is the real – you know, if you want to talk about foreign influence in Washington and the Trump administration, this is the real scandal.
And of course, it started in the Obama administration, but it got much worse when Trump came in.
At least within the Obama administration, there was some conflict and some people pushing back and having restraint.
Trump comes in and says, oh, no, we don't need this Obama restraint thing.
We're going to do all the way behind the Saudis.
That made the humanitarian crisis so much worse because the Saudis and their allies, the UAE, the United Arab Emirates, had this perception of a green light.
Now we have gloves off, green light from Washington.
We can bomb anyone we want.
We can starve anyone we want.
That's the situation that led up over the course of – that started in January 2017 with the Trump administration.
Finally, in December of 2018, almost two years later, we get this vote in the Senate to end unconstitutional U.S. participation that was never authorized by Congress.
It was unconstitutional when it started in March 2015 under the Obama administration.
This shows how really extreme the dynamics here are, that you have this blatantly unconstitutional war that was never authorized by Congress, never had anything to do with protecting Americans, just a favor from the U.S. government to the Saudi regime, and no real caring in Washington, effective caring, for almost four years about the tremendous civilian toll.
Because we just don't care what happens to people in Yemen.
I mean, Washington doesn't care.
They're just pawned.
So we have all this rhetoric about human rights and blah, blah, blah, and then you have the worst humanitarian crisis in the world caused by the policy of Washington.
Not like this question of, oh, should we intervene like Rwanda?
We are the cause.
The U.S. government is the cause.
And Washington did nothing for almost four years.
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Man, and you know, it's funny, too, the way the excuses for these wars just get cheaper and cheaper and easier and easier.
Where, you know, think about in 1990, the propaganda campaign against so damn insane.
We have to stop him.
He's murdering babies and stealing their incubators.
And he's going to nuke us with atom bombs and all of these things to get to launch that war.
In Kosovo, Clinton had to pretend that 100,000 innocent Kosovars had been massacred when there was a complete fabrication.
Bush had to pretend that Iraq was going to, you know, Saddam was going to give chemical and germ bombs to Osama.
Which is silly, but at the same time, if your mom believes it, it's scary as hell, right, kind of thing, you know, which was the purpose of it.
And people really did believe that.
In Libya, they had to pretend not that 100,000 had been killed, but that 100,000 would be killed if they didn't launch that regime change war there to protect the people of Benghazi, they said.
But with Yemen, with this war, they said the Obama administration, the Cossus Belli, as they told the New York Times, was they had to placate the Saudis.
Because the Saudis were upset about the nuclear deal.
So they said, OK, we'll launch this war.
They had no concern about the Houthis at all.
In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, as of January 2015, the Joint Special Operations Command and CIA, or I guess, I don't know, CENTCOM anyway, the military anyway, were working with the Houthis to target al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before Barack Obama turned right on them.
You know, the guys that bombed the coal and tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.
And then Obama turned right around and sided with al-Qaeda against the Houthis a couple of months later, quote, to placate the Saudis.
That's all they had.
That was their excuse.
I mean, that wasn't the scoop.
That was what they told the New York Times, the Obama team, why they did this.
And it goes on for four years, and it's the worst thing that ever happened.
And it doesn't matter.
Or I don't know, as you're saying, the Congress is finally trying to do a little something about this.
But you have all these nefarious amendments being attached, and then the germanitude is reduced, and then the whole thing.
So I guess I should ask you a thing instead of yelling at you anymore.
What do we do now?
Where are we at with these resolutions?
What can be done?
What number do people need to call?
If you call one number, I would call Nancy Pelosi.
If you call two numbers, I would call Nancy Pelosi and Eliot Engel.
It's the House Democratic leadership that this is really all about now.
The House Republican leadership couldn't do any dirty trick, because the House Democrats have the majority.
They couldn't do any dirty tricks if they didn't have the cooperation of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Eliot Engel, who's the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
All the dirty tricks now, all the Republican dirty tricks, when they work, it's because House Democrats decided to let them work, decided to cooperate with them.
So I would say the pressure needs to be on Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Eliot Engel to say, pass the Senate bill.
Clean vote, no amendments, no phony business.
Pass the same bill that the Senate passed and put it on the president's desk.
The president wants to veto.
Hopefully he won't.
But if he does, then that's on Trump.
But don't protect Trump from taking responsibility for this by sabotaging the effort of the Senate to pass a clean bill saying that unconstitutional US participation in this catastrophe has to stop.
Right.
After all, two years ago is a lifetime.
Four years ago is a lifetime ago.
No one even remembers that Barack Obama started this war.
They can just leave him out.
He doesn't have to indict the Democratic side in a partisan way.
Just stick with the here and now.
And I'm not saying let them off the hook, but I'm saying stop the war no matter what.
And if for that we just have to ignore the Obama role and just say, you know, the Democrats need to force Trump to stop doing this today and focus on that, then let's do that.
I bet Pelosi probably doesn't even remember Obama started it.
What does she know?
She's crossed that bridge already in the sense that all Senate Democrats and all House Republicans have already – I'm sorry, all Senate Democrats and all House Democrats have already voted to end this war.
So Obama has nothing to do with it now.
They've already – all the Democrats already went on the record saying this war is unconstitutional and it should stop immediately.
What we're dealing with now are these shenanigans.
So the thing that we need is for Democrats, really, around the United States to put pressure and scrutiny on the House Democratic leadership and say the buck stops here.
We're holding you – don't tell us all the terrible Republicans did these dirty tricks.
You're in the majority now.
You're in the leadership now.
You control the gavel now.
Whatever happens in the House is your responsibility, not the House Republicans'.
They can do – they can try to do whatever, but they can't do anything without your permission.
That, I think, is what's going to turn this around, is holding Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Eliot Engel responsible for what happens in the House now.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, too, is so the people in their districts especially, but the rest of us, too, can call them.
They are the national leadership, and they are responsible to all of us.
That's exactly right.
And the DCCC and these other Democratic things, they're raising money all over the United States all the time.
Nancy Pelosi is raising money all over the United States all the time.
So these people are accountable to a national Democratic audience because that's who's giving money.
Donors more than voters, but yeah, in other words – Donors more than voters.
Yeah.
Hey, it's an election season, and people can show up at these rallies, and they can help to controversialize this thing.
How in the world are you going to sit here and pretend that X, Y, or Z issue is more important than genocide?
And what else do you call it?
In fact, how about somebody asks Beto O'Rourke, what do you call it when one nation deliberately inflicts famine on another?
Beto, and what are you doing about it, dude?
I want to see him answer that, any of them.
I think that's a great question.
We know what Bernie's doing.
We know what the – because he's the lead sponsor of this bill.
Every Senate Democrat that's running for president has at least co-sponsored the bill, and Tulsi Gabbard in the House was also an original co-sponsor of the bill.
But these people could always be doing more to use their voice.
All these people have big platforms right now.
Bernie – we did a letter, Just Foreign Policy and Invisible did a letter just in the last couple days that was signed by more than 40 groups to the House Democratic leadership saying pass the clean bill that the Senate passed.
And the Hill wrote it up, and then Bernie tweeted out the article on the Hill.
So everybody could do that.
Everybody could be tweeting out or making a statement or whatever saying Nancy Pelosi passed the bill.
Or if they want to be more diplomatic, they can say House passed the bill.
Everybody could do that.
Beto O'Rourke could be doing that.
All of them could be doing that.
Hey, you know what?
Here's an update on the Rand Paul thing.
You know, I was attacking him in our last interview here, and he defended him and said, you know, he actually really does have a point here that the way this thing is written, it sort of makes an exception for the war against AQAP in a way that could later be interpreted as actual authorization for attacks against AQAP, etc.
And so it makes sense why Rand would maybe vote for it but not be way out in front on it, that kind of thing.
And then he actually did the right thing and attached an amendment that said this will in no way be interpreted to authorize war against anybody else in any other circumstances and this kind of thing.
And that got passed, too.
So that was a pretty good deal.
That's exactly right.
So when you talk about the clean resolution, that's the one that the House needs to pass is that same one, too, right?
Exactly.
Which it doesn't say, like, this hereby repeals the AUMF or whatever.
It just says, don't you come and quote this resolution later.
All you have is the AUMF if you're going to go and bomb AQAP there.
That's exactly right.
So that's pretty good.
I like to give Rand Paul credit when he deserves it because then he goes around and, you know, endorses Trump's endorsement of Netanyahu's seizure of the Golan Heights.
And so then I have to condemn him again.
But so I don't want to just do nothing but condemn the guy.
So try to make sure to point those things out when he does the right thing, you know.
Absolutely.
All right.
More activist stuff.
Your website is JustForeignPolicy.org and people can find out all kinds of things there.
But what are other websites, other groups, congressional hotlines and whatever else you need the people to know here, Bob?
Well, anybody can look up the phone numbers for Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Eliot Engel on the House website, House.gov.
People can sign the petition that's on our website.
There are other petitions people can sign, of course.
But people, these offices notice phone calls more.
Certainly these, you know, anytime any of these folks show up in public, it's fair game.
We, one of the reasons that, you know, Nancy Pelosi finally co-sponsored the bill is because we had a demonstration outside her office in San Francisco.
And the same thing was true for Adam Schiff.
So take advantage of any hall, any town hall, any opportunity to challenge these folks and say, what are you doing?
What are you doing to speak up about this?
What are you doing to raise the profile of this?
And, you know, one of the things that these House Democrats could do after they reached past this hurdle, passing the clean Senate bill.
Now Trump is threatening to veto, right?
So they could be thinking about, well, then what's their next move?
Well, one thing they could do is they could threaten Trump with impeachment proceedings on the House floor, because like war powers, that's also a privileged resolution.
Somebody like Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who's already talking about impeachment, she could talk about this.
She could say, hey, you know, this is violating the Constitution.
Here we've got the unconstitutional war.
Congress made very clear, House and Senate have voted to say this is unconstitutional.
If Trump continues this, this is clearly grounds for impeachment.
And maybe we can get – we can't get – don't have the votes in the Senate to remove him.
But we still can – you know, the House vote to impeach, that's a strong sanction for any president.
It's only happened twice in U.S. history.
You can sort of – some people would count Nixon because he resigned under threat of impeachment.
But in any event, you know, two or three times, depending on whether you count Nixon, that the House was either passed impeachment or was on the threshold of passing impeachment.
That's a strong sanction.
And we saw in August 2013 the Obama administration threatened to bomb Syria without congressional authorization.
Members of the House pushed back, said you can't do this without us.
At the end of the administration, reporters asked Ben Rhodes, how come you guys didn't just go alone?
And he said, we heard the congressional complaint as a threat of impeachment.
We saw that as the House saying, if you do this without us, that's an impeachable offense.
And that's what – a key thing that got the Obama administration to back down.
Really?
Where did you get that footnote from?
What was that again?
It's – I think it was at The Atlantic.
You can search, you know, Ben Rhodes, Syria, impeachment.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Tucking that one in my shirt pocket here.
Thanks.
Scott Riggel of Virginia led this very strong letter that began with the grievances about Libya, about the unconstitutional war in Libya, and then cited the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution that this is unconstitutional.
You can't do this.
This is an emergency.
Call us back in the session.
It's not an emergency because it was August recess.
Which is how they often do it.
They say, you know, this is an emergency.
Call us back in the session.
We can come back to Washington.
It's not an emergency.
Then it can wait until we get back in September.
And Obama blinked.
And Ben Rhodes explained that letter by saying that letter was so strong, so sharp, and, you know, 200 – almost 200 members of the House signed it, a majority of them Republicans, that the Obama administration interpreted that as an impeachment threat.
And Ben Rhodes said in this interview, we didn't want to give up our whole second term in office for this impeachment fight.
You know, we had other things that we wanted to do.
Now, here's the thing.
Let me interrupt you for a second here because this is really important.
I mean, first of all, I think kind of all good cynics recognize that presidents get in trouble for extracurricular stuff like Watergate break-ins and lying about affairs and these kinds of things, and never for genocide.
And that would just absolutely be huge for – or just for waging an unconstitutional, unauthorized war in defiance of the invocation of the War Powers Resolution by Congress and everything.
It's perfect.
It's textbook.
And there's no question that Donald Trump belongs in prison for war crimes for Yemen.
So impeach him, remove him, indict him, convict him.
Perfect.
But we're just coming down from this big fake Russia scam where he was accused of the highest treason in American history to make Alger Hiss and Benedict Arnold look like heroes.
And now all that's completely falling apart because it was ridiculous and bogus.
And so now to try to impeach him for anything, even the thing he most deserves to be held accountable for, this genocide in Yemen looks like desperate goalpost shifting on behalf of a bunch of sore losers who refuse to accept the results of the last election in the world's oldest democracy.
And that's a real problem.
And these Russiagators have just given this guy a Kevlar vest.
Some people could say that, but they would be wrong.
And the reason that we can say that they're wrong is, of course, the war was unconstitutional in March 2015.
But what's different now is that the House and the Senate have voted to say it's unconstitutional.
Every single Democrat voted for that and seven Republicans in the Senate and 18 Republicans in the House.
So this statement that this war is unconstitutional is bipartisan.
So if after Congress passes that with a bipartisan vote, then members of Congress – and Trump says, no, I refuse, I'm going to be stubborn, which is where we've never been before in history.
We've never been at this juncture where it got so far that Congress actually passed a War Powers Resolution.
Still less that Congress passed it and the president said, I don't care.
I don't care that you're invoking the War Powers Resolution.
I don't care that you're invoking Article I of the Constitution.
We've never been at that juncture before.
That's a constitutional crisis that we've never experienced.
So that is what creates the situation where it's not only plausible but righteous for a bipartisan group of representatives to say, look, we did this.
We didn't rush to do this impeachment thing on Yemen.
We did the normal thing that you're supposed to do.
In fact, we did other things that are even more moderate.
We did letters.
We tried to do an amendment.
Everything got shut down.
Finally, we get through with this unprecedented War Powers Resolution.
Still you're going to ignore Congress?
So that's the thing that creates the context where you can say, no, this isn't like Russiagate because, first of all, it's not partisan, and secondly, it's not fake.
It'll be objectively true that the Trump administration in that instance is insisting to continue an unconstitutional war even after Congress very clearly said this is unconstitutional.
And of course, again, it's not just a mere procedural thing, right?
It's this war that's creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
So that's the context in which it makes sense to talk about impeachment.
And the key thing, again, is this is a privileged resolution.
It does not need the permission of Nancy Pelosi.
Just like the War Powers Resolution, a single member of Congress can say, or Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar or Ocasio-Cortez or any of them can say, I'm insisting on this.
We will have a vote.
If you don't agree with me, then vote no.
But we will have a vote, and we're going to put people on the record saying whether they believe that we should do something about this in the context where we've already passed the thing saying that it should stop and the Trump administration still refuses to stop.
Now, one more thing on that, man, on the resolution.
I think you tried to teach me this before, but it didn't quite sink into my head.
There's the concurrent resolution, and then there's the other kind or something.
And one of those, Trump would have the right to veto.
The other, a bare majority, it's sort of outside of veto-ness.
It's not a law.
It's not a bill.
It's not the kind of thing that can stand for a veto.
So can you clarify the distinction there and which one the current bills are or resolutions are?
So the current bills are a joint resolution.
That is what has passed the Senate and the House.
So the business about if the House passes what the Senate passed, then it's a joint resolution, and Trump could veto it.
That's what a joint resolution is for presentment to the president.
Then if Trump vetoed, the House and the Senate could vote to override, which that's a high hurdle to get that supermajority of votes.
We didn't have that supermajority on passage.
Still, the vote is an opportunity for pressure.
We might find that we get more Republican support, can get more Republican support on the override, given that maybe some Republicans will sympathize with the argument that Trump is being defiant of Congress.
And this is constitutional powers of Congress they should stand up for.
But if that scenario doesn't work to force Trump to stop, then a single member of the House could introduce articles of impeachment for unconstitutional war.
And because impeachment concerns the constitutional privileges of the House, it is a privileged resolution, and the sponsor can force a vote, regardless of what the House Democratic leadership or the leadership of any committee says.
Nancy Pelosi, Benny Hoyer, Eliot Engel, doesn't matter.
Right, but were you telling me that there was a kind that he can't veto, either, that essentially...
Yes, that a concurrent resolution he could not veto.
And that would be another path that the House and the Senate could pursue.
Now, how different is that from what they've got?
I mean, in other words, could they just change the title on it and say this is a concurrent resolution now?
They'd lose half their votes that way if the votes were to really have meaning, is that it?
They could easily do that.
Nothing stops them from doing that.
It's only their choice not to do that.
And some people might say, well, Trump is ignoring us anyway, so what's the point of doing the concurrent resolution, because Trump might ignore that, too.
I mean, obviously you shouldn't do that, but as Andrew Jackson said about the Supreme Court when he did the Trail of Tears, he said, fine, you have your Supreme Court decision, now try and enforce it.
So Trump could be like that and say, I don't care what the Congress said.
I'm just going to do whatever I want to do.
So then how are you going to force Trump to do that?
Well, you have to escalate more pressure.
So you could do a concurrent resolution.
You could do impeachment.
You could also, of course, amend the military bill.
You know that.
The NDAA is the authorization for the Pentagon and the Department of Defense appropriation, so there's lots of vehicles that Congress can use.
These other vehicles are like the NDAA and DOD appropriations.
Those things are slower votes because they don't pass Congress until the end of the year.
So you can force votes sooner, but it's not a law until later.
The attraction of doing these things like privileged resolution is you can force a vote with potential consequence right now, anytime you want.
I see.
And at that point, I mean, he already said, I think, that he would veto it, which makes sense that he would.
If he was going to call the thing off, he'd call it off.
But that's OK, too, right?
The more fighting about it, the better, no matter what.
Absolutely.
He has threatened vetoes before without doing them, and other presidents have done that, too.
They threaten the veto to try to get their way in advance, and then they actually want to—it's not worth it to them to actually follow through on that threat.
So we don't know for sure what Trump will do until he does it.
But as you said, if he does veto, then the great thing about that is, first of all, he's taking all the responsibility for the catastrophe on himself.
Now it's nobody else.
He's the one choosing to continue by himself the unconstitutional starvation war.
And as you said, every fight is more publicity, more pressure, more blame for Trump, and then there's always another thing that Congress can do to make it more painful for Trump to continue on the course.
Yeah.
All right, listen, man, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all your efforts on this and your time on the show again.
Thank you.
I appreciate the opportunity.
OK, you guys, that is Robert Naaman.
He's at JustForeignPolicy.org.
Show up there, click on the campaigns, click around, find out what you can do.
Call your congressman, get involved on this thing.
Oh, you know what?
I didn't ask him to say it, but he said it before on the show.
The phone calls, they really do matter on the margin, but they matter on the margin, and that's something.
So chip in, make a little effort.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
