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All right, you guys, introducing Eric Eikenberry from Yemenpeaceproject.org.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Doing well.
Thank you so much for having me on.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate you doing the work you're doing and coming on the show to talk about it today.
And so today's the big day.
Tell us all about this Senate resolution here.
Yeah, well, Senate Joint Resolution 54 invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
To direct the president to withdraw all U.S. personnel assisting in the Saudi-led coalition bombardment of Yemen.
Up front, it does not touch operations against Al-Qaeda.
But it would withdraw our refueling support and our targeting assistance support to Saudi and Emirati planes that are currently conducting bombing raids that indiscriminately target Yemeni civilians.
According to the Yemen Data Project, Saudi and Emirati missions in Yemen against the Houthi rebel forces target recognizable civilian sites about a third of the time.
And that proportion has actually been rising in recent months.
So this fight, at least on the ground in terms of civilian casualties and in terms of the humanitarian situation, is more important and more pertinent than ever.
Right.
So, now tell me about this.
Because it's funny, I mean, you say it and there should be sound effects or something.
This has never happened before.
That U.S. Senators, in fact, including the most prominent Democrat, Bernie Sanders, in the U.S. Senate.
And he's only kind of a Democrat, but you know what I mean.
The most famous and prominent on the left side of the aisle there, helping to lead this thing.
And this has never happened before, right?
Where the Senate would attempt to invoke the War Powers Resolution to force the president to stop a military action?
No, this has never happened before.
It's been unprecedented.
And you're right, I think in my introductory remarks, I didn't give it the proper oomph it deserved.
Hey, it ain't your fault.
I'm just saying, you're doing the news here.
But yeah, no, I mean, I'm just saying, like, let's stop and go back and highlight this.
This is really huge, isn't it?
Yeah, and I think the important thing to highlight is not only is it the first time the War Powers Resolution has been invoked, but it really, in this situation in which it's being revoked, is really why the War Powers Resolution came into being in the first place.
We had a situation in Vietnam that caused the War Powers Resolution to come in to be promulgated in which, over the course of a decade, an advise and assist support logistical mission to certain Vietnamese forces against other Vietnamese forces became this catastrophic decade-long war that killed 2 million Vietnamese and 58,000 American soldiers.
And we are in a similar situation in Yemen.
Right now we're in an advise and assist capacity.
But it could get much worse depending on how the conflict moves forward, and the United States could see itself slowly but surely drawn in, which is why the invocation of the War Powers Resolution in this case is so apropos to what is going on.
I mean, really, Sanders, Lee, and Murphy, and the other co-sponsors who have gotten on, and we're hoping for more co-sponsors in the coming days, are really executing the exact purpose of why this resolution was passed.
All right, so we're recording this at noon Texas time on Friday, 1 o'clock Eastern.
So, now today, when is the actual vote?
Today is just the big everybody-call-your-senator day, but is that because they're voting later today, exactly?
No, the vote is not today.
The vote, it's up in the air right now.
So today is a call-in day, and I would encourage anybody who cares about this issue to call their senator, because if they're not a co-sponsor, this is very much up in the air.
This has never been done before, and a lot of Senate offices are very interested in exercising their constitutional prerogatives, but they're not, you know, it's a new vote.
They're not quite sure how to approach it.
So they need all the encouragement they can get.
But in terms of vote timing, we'll say it ripens in committee, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Monday, and it could come to the floor as early as Monday.
We don't know when it will.
That is a negotiation being worked out between the introducing offices and Majority Leader McConnell.
It could occur later in the week.
I would be surprised if the vote didn't occur next week.
So that's all the time I have.
The more time we have, it was a very quick turnaround time, so the more time we have, the more time we have for people who are supportive to call, frankly, the better.
But so as early as Monday, but could be later in the week.
Right.
And now the reason that there's a little bit of wind is because you're standing outside of the U.S. Capitol building right now.
And so can you tell me about the phone calls this morning and any reaction that you're getting, progress being made today?
I just got out of a little while ago.
I got out of a meeting with a Republican office, and I won't say which.
And they received some calls, and it was encouraging.
We have gone to offices, and we have had organizations, activist organizations, calling for about the past 10 days since the resolution was introduced.
And we have heard that calls are making a difference, particularly in a number of offices where we have really strong constituent action.
So your calls are making a difference.
We are being told calls are making a difference.
We are being informed by office staff that they are receiving calls.
That's great.
All right.
And then, I'm sorry, one more question here.
I heard just within the last hour that there's now a competing bill, which I wondered if that was a bad guy's attempt to undermine this one.
Yes.
Quite frankly, it is.
And unfortunately, it's very disappointing, because it looks like the senator who's introduced this competing joint resolution, Senator Todd Young of Indiana, has been very good on these issues in the past.
And we are trying to figure out what motivated him to introduce this resolution at this time, when it's clearly designed to undercut the War Powers Resolution that Sanders, Lee, and Murphy have introduced.
Just to give an overview of the problems with the competing resolution, it attempts to give senators an easy out.
This War Powers Resolution is hard.
It invokes tough constitutional questions.
But we're going to do this other bill.
It's a little lighter.
It would tie conditioning of refueling to the Saudi-led coalition to improvements in the humanitarian situation.
First, it doesn't say what metrics it would use to determine if the humanitarian situation would improve.
Second, its lever, so to speak, for determining these improvements is Secretary of State Tillerson, or whoever will be the new Secretary of State if he doesn't last the year, will come up to the Hill three times this year and inform Congress whether or not the Saudis have improved.
And that really appears to be it.
And I guess there's no sort of mechanism for if his report is found to be unsatisfactory, how refueling would be conditioned, how it would work.
And another final problematic aspect of this competing resolution is it gives a backdoor, or could potentially give a backdoor authorization for hostilities and war against Iran.
There's a lot of language about how, regardless of the humanitarian situation, the United States under this resolution and its Saudi allies would still have the leeway to attack, quote, unquote, Iranian terrorists in Yemen.
And so this opens a backdoor to really inflaming developing proxy wars in the region.
And it's just a very bad problematic resolution.
And we hope certainly, given that he has been still good on these issues in the past, especially the humanitarian situation, we hope Senator Young sort of rethinks this and withdraws this and allows there to be a clean, unmuddled vote on SJRES 54.
Right.
I mean, hey, at least they can twist the 2001 AUMF to say it applies to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
But this sounds like it would actually authorize this war that so far is already illegal.
This war that Obama launched three years ago against the Houthi regime that came out of the north there.
So, yeah, that's a real...
And you say that's Senator Young from where?
Indiana.
From Indiana behind that?
That's terrible.
All right.
And now I'm sorry, I got to ask you, where is Rand Paul AWOL on this?
We are working with Rand Paul's office.
Rand Paul has, or as we understand it, Senator Paul has outstanding concerns about a carve out in this measure.
In the language of this bill, as you just referenced, the 2001 AUMF has a very, very broad application to sort of Al-Qaeda and affiliated forces and has been used to justify a whole second war the United States is waging in Yemen against Al-Qaeda and ISIS affiliates in the country.
Senator Paul is not happy with this carve out because he thinks, at least our understanding, his office thinks that it justifies the 2001 AUMF in this product.
It's sort of expansive reading.
And that is not at all the opinion of the bipartisan coalition of organizations that is pushing this measure, nor is it the opinion of the Senate offices.
You're saying it's Rand's position that the 2001 AUMF covers the war against the Houthis?
No, not at all, not at all.
Oh, okay.
No, no, no.
He disappoints me a lot, but that sounds really bad.
So, okay, thank you.
Please correct me.
Yeah, no, no.
That is not at all.
I'm sorry if I explained this poorly.
No, no, no.
My fault.
It's my confirmation bias gets things twisted.
Go ahead.
Senator Paul is worried because the law has a carve out for AQAP, this particular resolution, there's a clause that says we're not going to touch, or this ending of refueling assistance and logistical support to the Saudi coalition is not going to touch anti-AQAP activities.
And Paul would like there to be changes to this language to say that actually, or Paul is thinking that the resolution written this way sort of justifies the government's expansive reading.
And Paul doesn't want to justify the government's expansive reading of the 2001 AUMF.
And this is a very legitimate point.
And a lot of the organizations pushing this resolution agree with this broader point.
But the thing is, if we don't have a carve out for AQAP in this particular instance, we are going to get lost in the weeds with the defense department.
Oh, wait, but couldn't you just delete that paragraph and not say either way about that?
Because if you're specifically talking about the Saudi war against the Houthis, that doesn't have anything to do with the CIA JSOC war against AQAP anyway.
Well, because a very small, and it's a very good question, and it's something we know we've had to wrestle with on the front end, but a very small amount of our refueling assistance to the Saudi-led coalition does apparently, according to the DoD and according to the Saudi and Emirati governments, go to some anti-AQAP activities.
But it's a very small proportion.
And so it's hard to tease that out.
And because, at least as of now, the DoD has argued that the 2001 AUMF applies to AQAP and ISIS, but because the anti-Houthi activities are definitely unauthorized, there is no plausible, tenable, remotely arguable legal argument for the 2001 AUMF to apply to any other activities in Yemen.
The war powers issue was much cleaner on the anti-Houthi front.
But if we include it or if we didn't have that carve out, the fear is that the DoD comes to all the senators and goes, you know, this removes all of our capabilities to counter AQAP and ISIS in Yemen.
And while that would be a fallacious argument, it would really probably sink the bill up front.
Yeah.
Well, and I wonder if Rand is just using that as an excuse, because he could turn right around and have a new resolution saying that the war against AQAP should not be considered part of the AUMF, too, if he wanted to have that fight, which is a good one.
Exactly.
I'm hard on him, but he deserves it.
No, and a lot of the organizations backing this particular measure would absolutely support him in that effort.
Unfortunately, the politics around, like the conflict in Yemen itself, the politics around this resolution are tricky, and so it has been written to be sort of in a very exact way that can avoid the most obvious potholes.
We really want to get to 51, and we think there's a real chance to get to 51.
But not wording it this way, maybe we come out with five or six, and we really think we have a chance to win.
So we're not embracing at all the DOD's AUMF argument.
We're sort of trying to table that for now, because we want to have that fight another day.
Okay, but so if Paul isn't co-sponsoring it and pushing it, is he at least promising to vote for the thing?
I am not sure.
I actually haven't personally had the chance to speak with Paul's office.
My understanding is that he's still considering, and it's still ongoing.
So if you are a constituent of Rand Paul's, I would really encourage you to call him up, because he actually endorsed—you remember H. Conres 81, which was a very similar measure in the House last year.
Right, we all thought he was going to co-sponsor this thing, and what a great opportunity it would be to have a big publicity stunt with Bernie Sanders and saying, here, look at me, we disagree on every single thing except this, and what a great way to push it, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I would just, you know, emphasize, Paul is not—he's not a no vote.
He's not a lost cause at all.
He's still considering.
My understanding is he's still talking with multiple coalition partners, which is why outreach, constituent pressure, calls to let him know that this is an important stand-alone vote and that this coalition probably in pretty close in the future attempts to cohere around new AUMF measures that will satisfy his arguments, you know, is forthcoming.
That this vote today is important and that future vote is important and that they don't compete with each other.
That's the message his office could use to hear right now.
Right.
And now, I'm sorry, before I let you get back to work there, tell me again about you really think that you can get to 51 on this.
I mean, you know, I can't make promises.
It could also—the issue is it's such a new vote.
It's such a new vote, and so there's no precedent.
There's no easy arguments people can fall back on.
And what I will say is, you know, my job, for the AUMF Peace Project, I do a lot of human rights work, a lot of civilian casualties tracking, things like that, and talking about the humanitarian situation.
But the constitutional argument on the Hill has been really strong on both sides of the aisle.
When you tell, you know, Democrats and Republicans across the spectrum that they really have—that this case in Yemen proved that they really have no functional oversight capacity, and the only way to claw back this functional oversight capacity and the only way to really reassert Congress's war powers authority against an expanding executive authority that's been going on for decades is a vote like this to set a strong precedent, that gets a lot of really positive remarks, or a lot of positive responses.
And so we really do think there is a chance for not only a large number of Democrats, but also a pretty significant number of Republicans to come over.
I'm not promising anything, but 51 is possible.
This doesn't just have to be a protest vote.
This can actually affect federal law.
Man, and just think how huge that would be, too, if really that passed, the invocation of the War Powers Act on something like this.
And, you know, I just want to add one comment onto the end of your interview here, which is that, you know, I'm from Texas, and so I left messages on the machines of Ted Cruz and John Cornyn there, and I just emphasized that Mike Lee is sponsoring this thing, and that Barack Obama got us into this mess and unfairly left it on Trump's lap, and it doesn't have to be this way, and I framed it in a right-wing partisan way for them.
And, of course, if people have Democratic senators, you'll want to frame it another way and say Trump is doing this horrible thing, and we don't want for him to be in charge of such a big and bloody mission like this anymore because we don't trust it, and et cetera, and frame it that way, and emphasize Bernie Sanders and the other Democrats that are part of it, and, you know, use the art of war, rhetorically speaking here, about how you approach your congressman, because the fact that you have this, you know, very conservative Mike Lee senator from Utah backing this, that's a great way for people to cover their right flank, that this is the conservative thing to do if that's who your audience is, right?
Oh, absolutely.
I just want to throw that in there.
Yeah, absolutely, and just real quickly, because I know I've just sort of talked up and I've been optimistic we could get to 51, given pushback from the DOD and the Pentagon on this, because I know they've been pushing back very hard, this could also fall back down to pretty low numbers, too.
There's a really wide spectrum of how this could fall, so your activism, your calls, your involvement, you know, people listening who care about this issue, is so, so important moving forward.
Right, and you know what?
Let me just emphasize that point, too, because that just sounds silly to my ears because everybody knows that the American people don't rule this country and, you know, what have you.
All these marble statues and buildings in Washington, D.C. are, you know, basically just public relations for a world empire, and yet I keep hearing from people like you and from Kate Kaiser and, you know, Dan McAdams, of course, who worked for Ron Paul in the House for many years as his foreign policy advisor, and other people who actually do work on Capitol Hill, and they say, man, your phone calls really do matter.
Make them.
And it's just a matter of multiplication tables.
If we can get those phones ringing, it really does have an effect on them.
So maybe not on every issue, and maybe, no, we can't stand up to the DOD every time, but maybe we could on this one and win on the margin with just a few more calls, you know?
Absolutely, and think of the precedent it will set moving forward, too.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, get back in there and get back to work.
Thank you so much for your time, Eric.
Really appreciate it.
No, thank you for the call.
All right, you guys, that's Eric Eikenberry.
He is at the Yemen Peace Project.
It's yemenpeaceproject.org, and here's what you do.
Call 1-833-786-7927.
1-833-786-7927.
You put in your zip code there, and they will forward you to both of your senators' offices in D.C., and make sure you leave your zip code with them.
They seem to think it's important, too.
That's 1-833-786-7927, and tell them you support, if it's Republican senators, tell them you support Mike Lee's resolution.
If it's Democrat senators, tell them that you support Senator Sanders' resolution.
It's Senate Joint Resolution 54 to stop the war against the Houthis, and, of course, that would include, then, stopping the blockade and stopping what amounts, honestly, guys, to genocide.
The deliberate inflicting of a famine on these people.
It's Saudi's war, but America's driving the thing.
Everybody knows who's the empire and who's the satellite here.
It's up to us, and it does make a difference, so do work.
Come on.
I'm not asking you to run for office or vote for anyone.
I'm just asking you to call your senator and tell him to stop doing the worst thing that they're allowing to happen.
That's fair, okay?
833-786-7927.
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