Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order of the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, the arms industry is a unique industry. It is not like making shoes or apparel. It is not like selling watches. You are selling things that, when used properly, kill other people. They are deadly weapons that we have. We have accumulated the technology by the taxpayer paying for this. We have helicopters, planes, guided missiles, and we are able to refuel planes. It is not a jobs program, and it is not something that--we don't willy-nilly give weapons to everyone. We don't sell weapons to Russia and we don't sell weapons to China because we have disagreements, and we don't think it would be in our best interest to sell weapons to them. We also don't sell weapons, typically, to people we think are untrustworthy. I think there is every evidence that Saudi Arabia can be put in that category. When you have direct evidence and when our own intelligence community has concluded that there is high confidence that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia butchered a dissident with a bone saw in a consulate in a foreign country, you would think that would give us pause as to giving Saudi Arabia or selling Saudi Arabia more weapons. But it is worse than that. We are not only selling Saudi Arabia offensive weapons, we are also talking about giving them nuclear technology. The nuclear technology, they say, is only for energy, but you have to wonder. A country that sits atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world is now saying ``Oh, we don't have enough fossil fuel. We need nuclear power''? There have been people who have gotten nuclear technology and then have moved on to nuclear weapons. What could possibly be the worst thing to happen to the Middle East? It would be to have three powers there with nuclear weapons. We had Iran before. They now have the knowledge to enrich. They made an agreement not to enrich. They are still threatening to enrich uranium. What do you think will happen if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear technology and there is any rumor of their progressing on towards developing nuclear weapons? What will Iran do? Automatically, they will do the same thing. It also happens in the conventional weapons arena. So every time we sell or give missiles to Saudi Arabia, what do you think Iran does? They have to either buy more or make more. It is an arms race. We are feeding both sides of an arms race. But you will hear people in Washington say: But Iran--they are a malign influence. Well, yeah. So is Saudi Arabia. But what do we do when we have two powers that show tendencies toward evil and show tendencies toward acting in ways that are against our national interest? Do we just blindly give weapons to anybody who is opposed to Iran because Iran is a malign influence? Well, what about Saudi Arabia? They have spent $100 billion spreading this radical jihadism to other cultures; $100 billion around the world preaching hatred of Christians, hatred of Jews, hatred of Hindus. Yet we give them more weapons. There is a madrasa supported by Saudi Arabia--that is a so-called religious school in Pakistan--and 80 percent of the boys who graduate from the school--because, of course, girls aren't allowed to go to school under this kind of religion--80 percent of the boys who graduate from the school fight in the Taliban against the United States. Why would we give weapons to a country that teaches hatred of our country and actually trains fighters to fight against our soldiers? What person in what insane world thinks it is a good idea to fund people who fundamentally don't like us? Why in the world do we keep doing this? Last week, we voted on sending weapons to Qatar. Do you know who Qatar supplies weapons with? Hamas. I thought we were allies with Israel. But we fund Qatar, which sends missiles and weapons to Hamas, who then bombs Israel. Qatar also hosts fundraisers for ISIS. Remember ISIS--the ones chopping people's heads off? Why would we give weapons to countries that give weapons to our enemies? In the Syrian civil war, we went in on the side of those who were opposed to Assad. Now, Assad is no saint, no Democrat, no Jeffersonian Democrat, no believer in freedom; yet the people on the other side-- most of them hate Israel. Most of them despise any rights for women. Most of them--many of them are allied with al-Qaida. Who is al-Qaida? The people who attacked us on 9/11. Al-Nusra, al-Qaida, ISIS--who do they get weapons from? Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Even Hillary Clinton admitted this in one of the emails that were released. Hillary Clinton was talking to John Podesta by email, and she said: We have to do something about this. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and providing logistical help to ISIS. So why does it go on? Some would say: Because people make a big profit on this. This is a jobs program for the arms industry, and we have to make sure they make their profit. I disagree. This is an industry that uniquely has to do with our national interests. It is uniquely paid for by the taxpayer. These weapons are owned by the taxpayer, and we should not sell them to people who are not our friends. This is what the debate is about today. We will vote shortly on whether or not we should sell offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia. What are they doing with the weapons? Well, they are bombing civilians in Yemen, for one. They are transferring some of the weapons in Yemen to al-Qaida. Al-Qaida and the larger umbrella group that attacked us on 9/11 are active. They are called AQAP in Yemen. There are news reports in the last week that Saudi Arabia is indiscriminantly giving arms to anybody who is opposed to the group they are fighting against, the Houthis. Who supports the Houthis? The Iranians. Is one side better than the other? Are we so blind to the malign influence of Saudi Arabia that we give money and weapons to anybody regardless of what they do? You can chop up a dissident. You can cut a dissident up to pieces with a bone saw, and we will still give you weapons? My goodness, I can't imagine. I do not think that people in this body who will continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia are listening to the people at home. I guarantee, if we asked the people at home, if we had a national poll and everybody got to give their opinion, how many people at home do you think are saying: Oh, well, they just chopped up a dissident--no big deal. Let's just keep sending them weapons. Oh, well, they are giving weapons to Hamas. Yes, you know, we don't really care. Or, well, they are bombing civilians. The Saudis killed 150 people at a funeral procession--people marching at a funeral procession. They knew it was a funeral procession. This was no fog of war, no mistake. This was an intentional act to kill people at a funeral procession. There were 150 people killed and 450 wounded. About 1 year ago, they killed 40 schoolchildren on a schoolbus. They are indiscriminately bombing civilians, and they are blockading Yemen, which is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Millions of people--some estimate between 14 and 17 million people--live on the edge of starvation because of this war. The Saudis are preventing food from coming in. They have blockaded Hodeida, which is one of the key ports where food needs to come in. Yemen imports 80 percent of their food. The Saudis are blockading them and people are starving, and we are allied with Saudis. We supply them with bombs that they drop on civilians and until the last few months we were refueling the very planes that were dropping the bombs. People talk sometimes about, you know, a dream of peace in the Middle East. If you want to have a peace plan in the Middle East, people say: Well, it is Israel and Palestine who have to come to a peace agreement. Do you know what the bigger problem is--an even bigger problem than that conundrum--which is a conundrum? It is figuring out how to have peace between Saudi Arabia and their allies and Iran. Everything around here is Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran. Do you know who spends the third-most amount of money on the military in the world? Saudi Arabia. First, it is the United States. We spend more than the next 10 countries combined. We spend more than all the rest of NATO combined, for that matter. Then, a distant second is China, and, then, there is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia spends more on their military than Russia and more than most of our NATO allies. Yet people say: Oh, we have to give them more arms because Iran is a bad actor. What if they are both bad actors? Currently, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms around them spend 8 times more than Iran. I am not saying Iran is a great place or that the government is great. What I am saying is, when you have two bad actors, when you have two malign influences, do you think we always have to choose the lesser of two evils? Do we have to always look askance and say: Oh, whatever--you know, as long as we are doing something that is opposed to Iran. One of our other so-called allies over there is Bahrain. We have a naval base there, and we say: It is important to have a naval base, and we have to look the other way. They have 4,000 political prisoners. Saudi Arabia actually imprisons people for political reasons, and they don't just kill them. They behead them and crucify them--I think, in that order. They put the bodies out for public display. They executed a guy named Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who was of a minority religion. The Saudis are Sunnis. This guy was a Shia religious person and spokesman. He was executed. His nephew is being held in prison and has been for several years now. He was 17 when he was arrested. His crime was sending a text message to encourage people to protest against the authoritarian regime of Saudi Arabia. I think the problem is that some people come to the conclusion that arms are always good and we should never do anything to condition the sale of arms to behavior. Well, I am not for sending more arms there, period, because it is a cauldron always threatening to boil over. Let's say you were someone who would say: Oh, no, we have to arm them. Perhaps we should condition arms on good behavior. Perhaps, if you are cutting up a dissident with a bone saw in a foreign country, maybe we should stop arms for a while to see if maybe you can get better people in the government or maybe to see if your ways will change. Saudi Arabia said: Oh, we are doing it differently now. We are not going to fund radical jihadism around the world. But they spent $100 billion infecting the world with the ideas of hatred of the West, hatred of Christians, hatred of Jews, and hatred of Hindus. There used to be a couple hundred of these schools in Pakistan. There is now said to be 20,000 schools in Pakistan. The Saudis support schools not just in Pakistan but throughout the world--in Indonesia and India and all over the Middle East. They support these schools that teach intolerance and hatred of the West. Yet we are one of their biggest arms suppliers. It makes utterly no sense, and it should be reconsidered. We will have a chance to vote today, and the numbers are growing. When I first introduced a resolution to disapprove of arm sales to Saudi Arabia, I think I got 22 votes. We did it again a couple of months later, and I think we got in the forties. I think there is a chance today that we will get close to 60 votes. We will have to get to 67 to overcome a Presidential veto. Look, I am a big fan of the President on many fronts, but on this someone has to stand up, even a Member of his own party and say: Arms sales are not jobs programs, and they should be conditioned on behavior, and we should not sell arms to countries that hate us. As for these countries that burn our flag and chant ``Death to America,'' we shouldn't be arming them. At one point in time, there were reports about ISIS. Remember the people who were beheading people in the desert over the last couple of years and spreading throughout the region? There were reports that they have $1 billion worth of Humvees. Some of them were captured, but some came because of indiscriminate arms. There are arms everywhere. So when we had the Syrian civil war going on, all throughout the news media--public, private, everywhere--everyone was saying that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were giving arms to anybody, indiscriminantly giving arms to people. One of the groups that got arms and one of the groups that got anti-tank weapons--these are shoulder-launched missiles--said in a news report right after they got them: When we are done with Assad--they didn't talk about ISIS, and most of them didn't care about ISIS because they actually kind of agree with ISIS's religion--we are going after Israel next. So we are arming people who are potential if not real enemies of Israel. We are arming people who are teaching hatred of the West, hatred of Christians, hatred of Hindus, and hatred of Jews. We are arming these people. Why are we doing that? Let's say you don't agree with everything I have said, and you say: Well, maybe we should get them to behave better. Why don't you withhold arms for 6 months at the least? Why don't we just stop for a while? They have enough arms to blow up the Middle East 10 times over. Is there just no stopping? Is there no limitation to what we will do? Do we not believe that any of our arms sales should be conditioned on behavior? This is a big deal and a big vote, and it is my hope that the American people will watch how people vote and decide: Is this who I want representing me? Do I want someone representing me who is selling arms to people who hate our country, who spend hundreds of billions of dollars on schools teaching hatred of our country? Do I want to have people representing me who continue to flood the Middle East with arms? That is what this vote is about, and I hope the American public will pay attention to how people vote today and to which direction they want the country to go in. We have had enough war. This is something I agree with the President on. We have had enough war. We have been at war too long in too many places. We have been 19 years in Afghanistan, and to what end? I was for the initial purpose of getting those who attacked us on 9/11. I would have voted to go. But after 19 years, it is nation-building. We are spending $50 billion a year. We build roads, and they blow them up. We build schools, and they blow them up. We have roads and schools crumbling in our country. We don't have an extra $50 billion to spend in Afghanistan. We are $1 trillion short this year. We are going to spend $4 trillion, and we are bringing in $1 trillion--not great economics, not great budget balancing on our part. No. 1, we cannot afford to try to be everywhere all the time, and, No. 2, the money we are spending overseas is counterproductive. We went into Iraq and toppled a dictator. What did we get? Chaos. In the chaos we get ISIS and other groups forming. We went into Libya and toppled the dictator in Libya. What did we get? Chaos. It is so confusing in Libya that I am not even sure which side the U.S. Government is supporting. They were supporting the U.N.- sanctioned government and now they appear to be supporting military generals who are trying to overthrow that government. One thing is for sure: The country of Qatar that we voted to send arms to last week is supporting the side opposite us. So we give arms to people who are directly involved in a civil war where we are involved on the other side of the civil war. To me, it seems utterly preposterous that we keep doing that. There is Qatar's support for the other side in Libya and their support for Hamas. They are letting ISIS and al-Qaida do fundraising in their country. Maybe we need to take a break from the arms race in the Middle East. I don't think that someone can make a practical or reasonable argument that there has been more peace since we sent more weapons over there. They have plenty of weapons to kill each other for another thousand years. They have been killing each other for 1,000 years. They have enough weapons to kill each other for another 1,000 years. Maybe we don't need to be involved in every civil war in the world. Maybe we can't afford it, and maybe when we have gotten involved, we had the unintended consequences of actually making it worse. People have this idea that when you topple a dictator, somehow the next person they elect is going to be Thomas Jefferson. Well, guess what. Every time we have toppled a dictator, the people they end up electing are not Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes in the elections we don't like whom they elected in the elections and people go back and topple them again. So when Egypt actually had an election, they elected somebody from the Muslim Brotherhood. Many in the Middle East and many in our country didn't want him. So we helped to get rid of him, and now we have a military rule with no elections and with the idea that you can be detained without trial. People say: Well, it is stable. It is another military autocracy, but we are going to put up with it. We need to rethink our approach to the Middle East. We need to rethink the approach that we need to arm one or both sides in every war. We need to think whether regime change is a good idea, and we need to look at the practical effects of our foreign policy and say: Are we safer somehow? I think one universal truth is that we are usually poorer by the time we are done, because what we end up doing is spending good money after bad. I will give you a couple of examples in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan we spent $90 million in a luxury hotel in downtown Kabul. You say: How does that $90 million hotel protect us? Well, it doesn't, but it is money. Money runs through all this. Somebody is getting rich, but not the American taxpayer. The guy who built it, I think, was a Jordanian national, but he built a shell of a hotel. He took the $90 million. He got all the payment, and it was never built. It mostly doesn't have walls, and none of it was completed. It is now a danger because it sits up across from our embassy and snipers crawl up in the building. So the thing is that we asked for $90 million, and we need more now because, apparently, we now need to tear it down because it is a danger to our embassy and our soldiers. So if we could just get $200,000 more, they are going to spend another couple hundred thousand dollars tearing down a hotel that we asked you to build in the first place, which we had no business building whatsoever. We built a gas station for them in Afghanistan, too. But because our purpose in the military is now sometimes to fight the enemy but also to fight climate change--you didn't know this, but part of the military's goal is climate change now--so we built them a gas station. But we want to reduce the carbon footprint. So we built a gas station that sells natural gas. Well, the problem was, No. 1, nobody in Afghanistan has a car. The average income is about $800. Almost nobody has a car, and no one has one that burns natural gas. So what they did is that they had to give them credit cards and buy them cars that actually ran on natural gas. We wanted to visit over there and the military said it was too dangerous to take us there. So we have no idea if it is even in operation at this point. I say we need to rethink this, and I urge today a vote against selling more arms to Saudi Arabia. Thank you.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, the Middle East is a hot caldron, continuing and continually threatening to boil over. I think it is a mistake to funnel arms into these century-old conflicts. There is no great certainty that the arms we send into the Middle East aren't one day used against our own soldiers. In fact, there is a real threat that someday our young soldiers will be sent to fight against the very weapons we send to these so-called allies. It has happened. In Iran, to this day, they still have some U.S. weapons that are left over from the weapons the United States supplied the Shah. In Iraq, some of the weapons we gave them to fight Iran were still there when we returned to fight Saddam Hussein. In Afghanistan, some of the weapons we gave to the mujahedin to fight the Russians were still there when we returned to fight the Taliban. These weapons have a life of their own. It is not certain that they will not be used against us and often have been. Proliferating arms in the midst of chaos is a recipe for disaster. It is hard to argue that sending arms into Libya and Syria has, in any way, advanced liberty. Dreamers often longingly speak of a peace plan for the Middle East. Maybe we should consider a peace plan that doesn't include dumping more arms into a region aflame with civil unrest, civil war, and anarchy. The argument goes that we must arm anyone who is not Iran. We are told that, because of Iran's threat, the United States must accept selling arms to anyone who opposes Iran, even bone saw-wielding countries brazen enough to kill a dissident in a foreign consulate. It doesn't matter how you act, how you behave, or whom you kill, we will still give you arms. What would happen if we just said no? What would happen if we simply conditioned arms sales on behavior? Are the Saudis so weak that Iran will run over them and run over the whole Middle East without our arms? Of course not. The Saudis now spend more on their military than the Russians. The Saudis have the third largest amount of military spending in the world, only behind the United States and China. Saudi is No. 3. Saudi Arabia is spending the third most on arms of anybody in the world. The Saudis and their Gulf allies spend eight times more than Iran. They are perfectly capable of defending themselves against Iran. What are the Saudis doing with all the weapons we give them? For one, they are bombing civilians in Yemen. They have been using our bombs and, up until recently, they were refueling their bombers with our planes. We have no business in the war in Yemen. Congress never voted on it. It is unauthorized, it is unconstitutional, and we have no business aiding the Saudis in this massacre. The Saudis have used these bombs to bomb a funeral procession. They wounded over 400 at a funeral procession--they wounded over 400 and killed 150. The Saudis recently bombed and killed 40 children on a schoolbus. The Saudis, with our support, continue to blockade one of the main ports of Yemen. As a consequence of this blockade and the Yemeni civil war, 17 million people live on the edge of starvation. In addition, the Saudis indiscriminately fed arms into the Syrian civil war. Even Hillary Clinton admitted this. In an email from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta, she wrote: ``We need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to Isis.'' Does anybody remember? We went to war with ISIS because of their horrendous violence and killing of civilians. We had to go back into Syria. Who was funding ISIS? Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Why in the world-- what sane person would continue to send arms to countries that are giving arms to our enemies? I introduced a bill which, unfortunately, will not get a vote today, and that is to quit arming terrorists. You say: Well, certainly you are not serious. Yes, I am serious. We send arms to terrorists. We send them, and there is a stopoff point--they stop off in Saudi Arabia, they stop off in Qatar, they stop off in Bahrain--but these arms are winding up in the hands of al-Qaida and radicals whom we say we are pledged to defeat and that our soldiers risk life and limb defending against. Let's make sure no one misses this point. Hillary Clinton admitted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were funding and arming ISIS. How insulting. Our brave soldiers are sent over there, risking life and limb, and we are supplying arms to the enemy. Hillary Clinton sent another State Department cable. In this, it read: ``Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al- Qaeda, the Taliban.'' That is whom we are fighting in Afghanistan. So we are fighting al-Qaida everywhere. We are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and they are being aided and armed by Saudi Arabia. This is insane. This policy makes no sense at all; that your dollars are buying weapons to be thrown into the Middle East to be spread among who knows whom. Patrick Cockburn concludes the emails reveal ``the State Department and US intelligence clearly had no doubt that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Isis.'' To add insult to injury, there are now reports that the Saudi-led coalition that is bombing Yemen are giving American weapons to al- Qaida-linked fighters in Yemen, hardline Salafist militias, and anyone willing to fight the Houthis. The problem with Congress is they are so obsessed with Iran, Iran, Iran that they can't understand they are giving weapons to people who are giving weapons to enemies of the United States. Because they so want to combat Iran, they are willing to turn away and give anybody in the Middle East anything they want because we say: We have to stop Iran--when, in reality, the big power there is Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms. On the one hand, we are told that al-Qaida is the enemy that attacked us on 9/11, which they did. On the other hand, we are told to turn a blind eye and send more arms to Saudi Arabia and Qatar that end up winding up in the hands of al-Qaida and ISIS. It is completely crazy. What sane person would sell arms to a regime that kills, tortures, and imprisons their dissidents? The Saudis routinely behead and then crucify their opponents. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was executed and crucified, and his nephew sits on death row accused of sending text messages to encourage people to come to a protest rally. In Saudi Arabia, if you insult the government or insult the King, you can be put to death. These are the people whom this Congress, this Senate, will shortly vote on sending your weapons to these people. It is insane. America needs to say: Quit sending our weapons to crazy people. Quit sending our weapons to ISIS. Quit sending our weapons to people who hate us. How can this possibly be? Because people say: Oh, no, Iran. If we don't give money to Saudi Arabia, Iran will take over the world. Saudi Arabia spends eight times as much on their military as Iran. There is no danger of Iran taking over the Middle East with Saudi Arabia there. There is a great danger, though, if we keep funneling arms in there and fueling the arms race that the powder keg will blow up. Since the 1980s, the Saudis are estimated to have spent $100 billion exporting radical jihadism. This is a crazy ideology that preaches hatred of Jews, hatred of Christians, hatred of Hindus, and hatred of the West in general. This is whom they want to send weapons to: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain. They don't like us. They take our money, they take our weapons, but they don't like us. They don't like Christians. They don't like Jews. They don't like Hindus. The Saudis fund tens of thousands of madrassas. Madrassas are religious schools that teach the radical form of jihadism that Saudi Arabia supports. There used to be a couple hundred in Pakistan. There are now tens of thousands of madrassas in Pakistan. At one particular madrassa, 80 percent of the students join the Taliban when they leave school. Why in the world would we send arms to a country like Saudi Arabia that is funding madrassas that are sending soldiers that we have to fight against in Afghanistan? What kind of bizarre world do we live in that we are arming people who arm our enemies? It has also been reported that the administration wants to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. That is genius. News reports reveal that the administration authorized giving U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia weeks after Jamal Khashoggi's murder, weeks after Saudi Arabia was implicated and the CIA actually concluded that the Crown Prince of the country was responsible for the bone saw-dismembering murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The administration says: Well, we should probably give them nuclear technology. Well, it is just going to be for energy purposes. One cannot overstate the calamity that awaits the Middle East and perhaps the world if Saudi Arabia should misuse peaceful nuclear technology in the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Without question, Iran would follow. A Middle East with three different countries with nuclear weapons is not something any sane person would want to contemplate. Today's vote is not directly about Saudi Arabia. We will have another vote next week or in the near future about selling arms to Saudi Arabia, but, indirectly, today's vote is about the wisdom of proliferating arms in the Middle East. Today's vote is specifically about disapproving U.S. arms sales to Qatar and to Bahrain. First, let's look at Qatar. Is Qatar a good actor in the Middle East? There are dozens of reports that U.S. weapons sold to Qatar wound up in the hands of al-Nusra. Who is al-Nusra? Al-Nusra is an al-Qaida-like affiliate of radical Islamists who hate the United States and hate Israel and would set up an extreme form of radical Islamist government. They are there to win. We didn't directly give them weapons, but we gave weapons to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which gave weapons to al-Nusra in the Syrian civil war. There are also reports that Qatar's weapons have been so indiscriminately distributed throughout the Middle East that many of these weapons have also wound up in the hands of ISIS. So al-Qaida, al- Nusra, and ISIS are getting weapons from Qatar. Where does Qatar get the weapons? From the United States. The vote today is whether we should keep sending weapons to Qatar, which then sends them to our enemies, and then we send our soldiers to the Middle East to fight against our own weapons. It is insulting; it is insane; and it needs to stop. There are also reports that Qatar has been linked to support for Hamas. I am not talking about one report. I am talking about dozens and dozens and dozens. Hamas is violently trying to remove or obliterate the State of Israel, our ally, but we are going to give weapons to Qatar, which is giving weapons to Hamas, which has pledged to devastate Israel. Does that make any sense at all? Why would we give weapons to Qatar, which gives them to Hamas, which would attack our ally Israel? It makes no sense at all. Former Under Secretary for Terrorism, David Cohen, writes: Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally, has for many years openly financed Hamas. Cohen also noted that Qatar allows fundraisers to solicit donations for al- Qaida and ISIS within Qatar. Many sources claim that Qatar has also provided safe haven for al- Qaida leadership. Qatar is so distrusted that even the bone saw- wielding Saudis think it is unwise to sell arms to Qatar. The Saudis, no stranger to terrorism, cut diplomatic relations with Qatar over allegations that Qatar was supporting terrorism. They both have supported terrorism, and now Saudi Arabia is saying: Qatar is even worse than we are. We are bad. We give arms to terrorists. Sure we do, yes, but Qatar is even worse, so we are not going to give any arms to Qatar because Qatar is giving them to even worse people than we give them to. In the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Qadhafi in Libya, there is civil war, there is chaos, and it is a breeding ground for terrorism. Qatar supports the faction opposed to the faction we support. It could change next week. But as of now, we are going to give Qatar weapons today, and they are involved in Libya on the side opposite of what we are supporting. Why would we give weapons to a country that opposes us in a civil war? There is a good question as to why we would be involved in the Libyan civil war at all and why we ever went over there to topple their government, but that is now water under the bridge. You have this chaos in Libya, where the United States is supporting one side and Qatar is supporting the other side. So why in the world would we give weapons to people who are opposing us in an armed conflict? No one disputes that Qatar has armed al-Qaida and other radical groups throughout the Middle East. People say: Oh, we have a base there. They let us land. They let us do stuff. So we need to look the other way and not care that they continue to support al-Qaida, ISIS, al-Nusra, and other radical elements throughout the Middle East. How much of a risk is it to sell arms to Qatar? Only time will tell. How much of a risk is it that in the future our soldiers may fight against U.S. weapons that Qatar passes along to extremists? I think that is a very real risk. It has already happened, and it will continue to happen. If you do not condition armed sales on behavior, they will not change their behavior. Some say: Oh, we have to do this. We have to have a base there. We have to do it. They say that particularly with Bahrain. Bahrain is an island nation, a small nation. We have a big Navy presence there and thousands of sailors there. So they say: Well, it is our naval base. It is a stopping port. We need this naval base, so we are going to look the other way. We look the other way for a country that is ruled by a monarchy composed of a minority. The Shia population, which is a form of Islam, is about 70 percent of the public. Twenty-five, thirty percent is Sunni, and that is the monarchy. If you are Shia, and you object to the government or you criticize the government, guess what--you are imprisoned. There are currently 4,000 political prisoners in Bahrain. Bahrain bans any political opposition. One opposition leader, Sheikh Ali Salman, is in prison for life for speaking out against the government. Student leader Moosa Abdulla Moosa Jaafar was sentenced to death for protesting against government policy. Nabeel Rajab was given 5 years in prison for exposing and tweeting about torture in Bahraini prisons. Famous Bahraini football player Hakeem al-Araibi was arrested on his honeymoon in Thailand and held for 76 days by the Bahraini Government. In January of this year, the prominent Shia cleric, Sayed Majeed Al Meshaal, was arrested for criticizing extrajudicial killings by the Bahraini Government. Should we be sending offensive weapons to a regime that uses violence to quell political dissent? Should we be funding a regime that is currently involved with the Saudis in bombing civilians in Yemen? Should we send offensive weapons to a country that has been indiscriminately killing civilians in Yemen? Should we send offensive weapons to a regime that tortures and unjustly imprisons and outlaws its political opponents? The weapons that this Congress will send to Bahrain, to this minority monarchy, to this authoritarian government may someday wind up in the hands of revolutionaries. How long will it be until the powder keg of Bahrain has its own revolution? We did this in Iran. We sent them to a ruler who didn't represent the majority in Iran, the Shah. We did it for a long time. But in the end, from the backlash that came in Iran and the downfall of the Shah, our weapons fell into the hands of people who hate our country. The same could happen in any one of these powder keg countries in the Middle East. The weapons we send to Bahrain today may well be in the hands of revolutionaries in the near future. The facts are not contested. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain have all allowed U.S. weapons to be funneled to radical Islamist groups throughout the Middle East. Dumping more weapons into the Middle East will not get us any closer to peace. A ``yes'' vote today is a vote for sanity. A ``yes'' vote is a vote to quit sending arms to people who abuse human rights. A ``yes'' vote today is a vote against aiding and abetting the Saudi-led war in Yemen. A ``yes'' vote today is finally a vote for restoring Congress's proper role as a check on Executive power. Our Founding Fathers were wary of granting any President too much power. James Madison wrote that the executive is the branch most prone to war. Therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, granted that power--the power to declare war--to Congress and not the President. I urge a ``yes'' vote today to help restore a semblance of the separation of powers that is necessary to preserve our great Republic. Thank you. I yield back my time.

Mr. PAUL. Under the previous order, and pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, I move to discharge the Foreign Relations Committee from further consideration of S.J. Res. 20 and S.J. Res. 26, relating to the disapproval of the proposed foreign military sale to the Governments of Bahrain and Qatar.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, I rise today to let the American people know that there are some of us left in Washington--some of your representatives--who actually do care about the mounting debt. We now have over $22 trillion worth of debt, and you ask yourself: Whose fault is this? How did it get so out of control? How did we accumulate so much debt that we are accumulating debt at $1.5 million every minute? Under George W. Bush, the debt went from about $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Under President Obama, it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. Under President Trump, it will go from $20 trillion to about $30 trillion. So the debt is out of control, and you ask yourself: Why is no one doing anything about it? Whose fault is it? Well, really, I think you can see that it is a bipartisan problem. Both parties are at fault. We have a debt now that exceeds $22 trillion. If you have ever seen usdebtclock.org, you can see the numbers spinning out of control. Now, how would that apply to an individual? Each individual American in the country owes about $70,000 of that debt. Some people say: Well, it is so enormous; do deficits really matter? In fact, I think it was one of the changes, when Republicans way back said that deficits don't matter. Well, it actually does matter. It matters to your budget each year because what happens is that as interest grows, it crowds out everything else. In fact, interest right now is the fourth leading item in the budget, only behind Medicare and Social Security and defense. But if you look at interest on the debt, what is going to happen over the next decade or so is that interest is in the red, and you can see interest is climbing and will exceed, over time, both defense and also Social Security. So it is a real problem. As interest on the debt rises, it sort of crowds out all other spending. So what are people doing about it? What are your Senators doing about it, and what are your Congressmen doing about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Democrats control the House. Will they have a budget this year? So far, goose egg, no budget. How about the Republicans in the Senate? Do they have a budget? Well, they did pass one out, but there is no plan of ever voting on it on the floor. So what we will get to vote on today is my budget. My budget is called the Penny Plan Budget. What my budget does is that it cuts one penny out of every dollar. (Mr. BOOZMAN assumed the Chair.) It is interesting because as I see people come to Washington--and almost everybody who comes to Washington wants money--and I tell them: First of all, I have to tell you, we have no money. We are $1 trillion short this year. People have such good causes. They say: Well, we want money for this disease or that disease. I say: Well, wait a minute. What if we said that we will give you 99 percent of what you had last year? We will give you one penny less. So if your charity or disease or the thing you are concerned about got $100 million, next year you get $99 million. Here is what is interesting. Most of these people are advocates for Federal money. They often advocate for the State government looking for more Federal money. I have yet to meet a person, liberal, conservative or independent, who doesn't say: Hmm, I get 99 percent of what I got last year, and everybody would get the same? We would spend 99 percent of what we spent last year, and it would be spread across every sector, every sector that the right or left wants? I say: Yes. We spend 99 percent, and if you do, guess what, the budget balances in 5 years--or at least it did until recently. I have been proposing the penny budget for the last 6 or 7 years, and up until now it actually balanced in 5 years if you cut one penny out of every dollar, but guess what. The longer you wait, the more interest there is, the more of a burden of debt there is, and the harder it is to actually fix the problem. So this year, for the first time, we have to call it a two-penny plan. It still balances in 5 years, but we spend only 98 percent of what we spent the previous year. What would happen? You will still have 98 percent of your government. Is there anybody in America who does not believe there is 2 percent waste? I think, if you did a survey of the American people, they would probably be more accurate than up here. There has to be 10-percent waste in these programs. We find it all the time. I will give you two quick examples. We are spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, and even for those who advocate staying in Afghanistan for another decade or more--which I don't--we are spending money on wasteful things. We spent $90 million on a luxury hotel across from our Embassy. It was never completed. It is a shell of a building, and the Taliban can crawl into this building and shoot down into our Embassy. Now our soldiers have to risk life and limb to patrol an empty hotel that somebody ripped us off on for 90 million bucks and fled the country. We built a $45 million gas station in Afghanistan. It was supposed to cost a half million, but 83 cost overruns later, it cost $45 million. Guess what kind of gas is pumped at this gas station, if you could ever get there to see if it exists--natural gas because somebody decided that the defense industry should be reducing the carbon footprint of the world, and we weren't supposed to be killing our enemies so much as reducing the carbon footprint of the world. So we built a natural gas station in Afghanistan. The problem? They don't have any cars. The average income in Afghanistan is about $800 a year, and there are very few people who have cars, and of the ones who do have cars, none of them run on natural gas. The examples go on and on. We spent $2 million studying whether, when someone sneezes on the food in front of you at the cafeteria, you are more or less likely to eat the food. It took them $2 million to figure that one out. This is throughout government. There is, at the least, 1 to 2 percent waste. There is probably 10 percent waste and just throwing the money-- it would almost be better just to burn the money. What do we do? Who is saying anything about it? The media says no one is, and this is fake news--it is a lie--because when the tax cuts came around, I insisted the tax cuts be paid for. How many people voted with me? Eight Senators, all Republicans, not one Democrat. So you ask yourself what are the Democrats for? Are the Democrats for balancing the budget? No, they don't care at all about the deficit. Do Republicans care? Some do, most don't. So we are going to have a vote on my budget which cuts two pennies out of every dollar, balances the budget within 5 years, and then actually lets the budget grow at 2 percent a year for the remaining 5 years, and we would be a much stronger nation. If we were to actually balance the budget and then let the country move forward and grow, once again, we would have the greatest confidence. The world would have great confidence in us again. If we don't do it, I think there is a real problem coming for us. There is going to be a day within the next 10 years that interest will actually exceed $1 trillion. Right now we are spending $400 billion on interest. So it is a real problem. It is crowding out everything else, and it is becoming one of the largest items we have in the budget. Why can't we get there? What seems to be the problem? The first problem is math. They have us kind of--it is fuzzy. It is called Washington math. Washington math, if you read the Washington Post, they will say: Oh, no. It is not just cutting 1 percent; your budget is going to cut $10 trillion over the next 10 years. Here is what the difference is. If we don't spend any more money-- last year, we spent $4 trillion. If we keep spending $4 trillion over the next 4 years, would that be cutting any money or spending the same amount? Be careful what you answer. The Washington Post and the liberal media will tell you we have now cut $10 trillion if we keep spending the same amount over 10 years. Why? Because they are anticipating the curve of spending. The baseline of spending, this red line, is going up. Spending is going like this, but most people in their normal household income would say: I made $40,000 this year, and next year, if I make $45,000, that is an increase. The government would say: No, we anticipated your making $45,000 next year, so it is not an increase. They work it on a baseline that is elevated. So if we don't spend $10 trillion more next year than we did this year, over the next 10 years, they will say we have actually cut spending. This is a real problem. For example, it is this dotted green line. We cut 2 percent a year over a 5-year period, and then we allow government to grow at 2 percent a year. People would say: Oh, well, it doesn't look like you are really cutting spending. That is the truth of the matter. Over a 10-year period, spending will increase 18 percent over where we are today, but the fake news media will report that we cut $10 trillion. This is not a rounding error. We say spending is going up 18 percent, and the fake news will say they cut $10 trillion in spending and orphans and widows and the older generation will be out on the doorstep, and there will be no more government. No. We are talking about a $4 trillion government that is still spending close to $4 trillion. What we will not let it do is go to $5 trillion over the next 10 years. This is eminently reasonable. I have talked to people from the right, the left, and the center, and said: Can you live with 99 or 98 percent of what you spent last year? I have yet to have a person say that for the good of the country, why don't we do that. What would happen is, it would be a compromise. Who drives the spending debate around here? Who drives that we need more spending? It is really both parties, but recently it has been Republicans. The Republicans say: We have to have more military spending. The Democrats say: We will give you more military spending if you give us more welfare spending. So all spending goes up. That is the compromise. People say we don't compromise. Hey, we are spending money, and these guys compromise every day, and it is at your expense. It is why the deficit is so big. What about a different compromise? What if the right and the left said military is important--the left said, social welfare is important, but you know what, for the good of the country, let's spend 99 percent of what we spent last year on these programs or 98 percent. It could be done, but it takes resolve, and the American people need to know that those who are in charge are not doing anything about this. Now, some will argue, and the fake news media has argued, well, it is all about the tax cut. Republicans don't care about the deficit because they cut taxes. Well, that is actually not true. We actually had more revenue last year than the preceding year, even though we did cut taxes. So we had $14 billion more in taxes but $127 billion more in spending. So the problem is a spending problem. Of all of our spending, which is about $4 trillion in spending or a little bit more, about two-thirds of that spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. We don't ever vote on any reforms to these programs. These are called the entitlements, and nobody has any bills. There are no bills coming forward to look at the entitlement spending. Why is this a problem? The remaining third of government spending is half military and half welfare. If you eliminated the military spending completely and eliminated welfare spending completely, entitlements still drive the deficit. So what do we have to do? We have to make some tough choices. I was very honest with the people who voted for me. I told them, look, we are living longer, and we have less kids, so the demographics of Social Security and Medicare don't work. The main reason Medicare and Social Security is short is because we have smaller families. Your great- grandparents had a lot of kids, your grandparents had less kids, you had less kids, and your kids today are having less. So we have less and less young people and more and more old people. It is a demographic imbalance. That is why Social Security is short, and that is why Medicare is short, but you can fix them both easily. You have to gradually raise the age when we begin taking Medicare and Social Security. We already did it in Social Security. We did it under Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. A conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat in 1983 came together and said: We are running out of money. What do we do? They actually did raise the age from 65 for Social Security very gradually to 67. I haven't heard one person debating it since. Everybody accepted it and said: Look, in order to keep these programs intact and not bankrupt the country, we have to do this. This is what Democrats and Republicans should do now: Come together and say Social Security is $7 trillion short. Medicare is $35 trillion to $40 trillion short. If you do nothing, they are both going to implode. If you want these programs and you want them to continue, you have to do something. Very gradually raising the age at which people start Medicare and Social Security has to be done. You can either do it now and do it very gradually, a month or two a year over a 20-year period, or you can wait until they are completely bankrupt. If you wait until Social Security is completely bankrupt in 2034, what happens is everybody has to take a 25-percent cut, but if you do it very gradually, you will never have to have these cuts. It just means that everybody will have to wait a little bit longer to get there. It is important that we do have budgets. We have this enormous debt of $22 trillion. We are adding $1 trillion dollars each year. Yet the Senate will not vote on a budget this year, other than my budget, and the House, controlled by Democrats, will not vote on a budget either. So you have both Houses really not tending to their duty. Now when we have a vote for the balanced budget amendment, everybody turns out in force and votes. In 2012, we had a vote in this body, and every Republican voted to balance the budget in 5 years--an amendment to the Constitution that would require 5 years. Yet the Republican budget that is coming out of committee never balances. So we kind of give lip service to this idea. When people are at home campaigning, they pound the table and say: We are going to stop the deficits. We are going to be the frugal party--and guess what. Neither party has been very good with your money. It is because they are afraid. They get elected, and they become afraid that they will be unelected if you tell them the truth. I think we live in a time where it is the opposite now. People want someone to tell the truth--the emperor has no clothes. Social Security spends more money than comes in. If we don't admit these truths and have a discussion about them and if we are so occupied yelling at each other over elections and who did what during the last election--have you heard any discussion on television, have you seen one television program talk about Social Security going bankrupt, $7 trillion short; Medicare going bankrupt, $35 to $40 trillion short? Have you heard any news program or have you seen anything on the news--right, left, or center--that actually talks about our problems? No, it is yack, yack, yack about election this and election that. People are still unhappy with the results of the election, when in reality maybe we should talk about some of the difficult problems that confront us. I think the No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. I am not alone. Admiral Mullin, who was Chief of Staff under President Obama, said the same thing. There are people in the military who understand that maybe our military mission is so big that our military can't keep up with it. If we are going to have troops in 50 of 54 African countries, if we are going to have troops in every Middle Eastern country, and if we are going to have large bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, yes, maybe we don't have enough money. Our Founding Fathers said you only go to war when Congress votes on it. Recently, there has been a rattling of sabers over Iran. We are tightening the screws on Iran and not letting them sell oil to anyone. They are getting their back up and tensions are flaring. Well, the Constitution says very clearly that you don't go to war with anybody-- including Iran--unless you ask Congress for permission. The President does not have permission to take us to war. Many people don't realize this. The Founding Fathers specifically didn't want to give that power. In fact, it was Madison who said that the executive is the branch most prone to war; therefore, we have, with studied care, vested the power to go to war in Congress. Yet we live in a time in which Presidents of both parties take us to war. President Obama began and continued the war in Syria, in Libya. President Trump has continued those things on both sides of the aisle. But it is not just whether it is good or bad foreign policy; it is extraordinarily expensive. We are bankrupting the American people. We are borrowing money at a million and a half dollars every minute. Really, this is sort of a crummy gift to the next generation. It is like: Oh, by the way, you are lucky. You are going to be inheriting the national debt, and you will be paying for it. Kids already realize they are inheriting this college debt. It is difficult to pay college debt. As you look at this and you look at the individual share, here is 2015--about $58,000 per person with the debt. But look at what it is doing over time. It is pyramiding. The debt is beginning to explode because we are just doing nothing to rein it in. Whenever we have a vote on trying to do something about the debt, as we did when we passed the tax cut--I introduced a budget motion that said the tax cut should be paid for with spending cuts. We got eight Republicans. I introduced another motion that said we should use budget reconciliation--fancy words for a majority vote--to actually rein in the spending and entitlements. I got four votes. There aren't enough people up here. The people up here don't seem to care about the debt. They just think, oh, we will just pile it on, and we will be fine. But we are hollowing out the country. When people talk about hollowing out the country, the one thing is the debt. We superficially are doing quite well at this point, but there will be a day of reckoning. There will be a day of reckoning on which the government will have to make a decision, and the decision becomes to print more money to pay for the debt, at which time the country loses the value of its currency. It is happening in Venezuela. Do you know what the inflation is down there? It is 130,000 percent. The money is worthless as soon as they print it. You have to be paid a couple times during the day because if you start working at 8:00 in the morning, by 5:00 in the evening, the money is worth less and less. It virtually has no value. We have to decide. Do you want something for nothing? Do you really believe we can give you free college? Do you think it is really free? Do you think nobody is going to have to pay for it? Do you think we can give you free healthcare? Do you think we can give you a free car or a free cell phone? No. Somebody pays for it. If we don't pay for it through taxes, we just pile on the debt, and we are destroying the country with it. Most people sort of know this instinctively. There is no ability to have something for nothing. You have to work for it. The thing is, if we go on and on and say we are just going to keep piling on the debt, the day of reckoning is coming, and when it comes, a once great country could be dragged down by this mountain of debt that we have. Today my budget will be put forward. It is the Penny Plan budget. The Penny Plan budget is now basically the two-penny budget because it no longer balances in 5 years if we cut one penny. But if we cut two pennies, meaning that next year, we would spend 98 percent of what we spent this year--is there anybody in America who thinks the government and the people who receive stuff from the government couldn't live on 98 percent? When I ask people in my office who actually work in the private sector, they say yes. Many times in their career, there was a downturn in sales, and they had to take less money or less income--some people said significantly less--or they had to cut back on their family expenses. Do you know what government does? The opposite. If we go into a recession, there is this leftwing, egg-headed idea that we should spend more money, that we should go further into debt and start lavishing out money instead of--when you are not selling things and things aren't doing as well, you cut back on your consumption. You cut back on things. We have a great country. We shouldn't let it get away from us. I don't think there is any way in the world we could not move on and become a stronger nation if we would try the Penny Plan. Like I said, people should pay attention to this because all these representatives-- at least on the Republican side--go home and say they are for balanced budgets, but they are not really for balanced budgets if they vote for budgets that never balance. The budget by Republicans coming out of the Senate committee never balances. The budget from the Democrats hasn't even made it out of committee. There probably will be no vote in the House or the Senate on the budget. Neither one of them ever balances. It is in the Republican rules that we are supposed to advocate for a budget that balances in at least 10 years. Now we are putting forward budgets that never balance. Look at what the deficit has done. The red is what has already occurred, and the pink is what is to come. Most of this is driven by entitlements. You will hear that as an argument. Particularly in the Republican caucus, they will say: Yeah, it is all driven by entitlements. We need to do something about entitlements. Then you put forward a bill. I have a bill. I have a bill to reform Social Security by gradually letting the age go up a month or two a year over the next 20 years. I also would means test the benefits, meaning that wealthier people would receive a little bit less Social Security. People would say: Well, I don't want to do that. If you don't, the whole system is going to implode. So can't we go ahead and just do it now and do it in the least painful sort of way? Do you know how many people I have on my bill? I think there are four people brave enough to put their names on a bill that would gradually allow the Social Security age to go up. But if you talk to people quietly, even on the other side of the aisle, they will admit to you that, yeah, we ought to do something, but nobody ever does anything. The other side says: We will do it only if you raise taxes on the wealthy. We already have a progressive Tax Code. Interestingly--a lot of people don't know this--our Tax Code in America is more progressive than Scandinavia's. You have heard some of the clamor for socialism. They want Swedish socialism. Well, we have higher taxes on the wealthy than they do in Sweden. In fact, in Sweden, in Denmark, it is the opposite, actually--the middle class and the poor are more heavily taxed than in our country. When you look and you hear people say ``Well, Sweden and Denmark--why don't we become Denmark? Let's give everybody paid leave, free paid leave. Let's give the uncle of the baby free paid leave. Let's give everybody--the grandparents need paid leave. It is all going to be free,'' well, guess what, they do stuff like that in Scandinavia, but everybody pays a 25-percent sales tax. It is not free. Everybody pays a 25-percent sales tax in Scandinavia. In addition, the income tax in Denmark--and many of the other countries are similar--is 60 percent at $60,000. Do you want to buy a car in Scandinavia? Do you wonder why these people are freezing, riding their bike all winter long? There is a 200-percent tax to buy a car. If you want to buy a $30,000 car, you have to have $60,000 up front to pay the government, and then you need another $30,000 to buy the car. It is not free. There is no free lunch. When people say that government can provide you all these things, they can only do it by either taxing you or borrowing. Right now, we are doing it mostly through borrowing. The reason I think it is probably destined to get worse over time is we have gradually taken people off the tax rolls. Really, below $50,000, there is a very minimal amount of income tax being paid. In fact, those who are in the top 10 percent pay almost all of the income tax in our country. People say: We need to stick it to the rich; the rich aren't paying their fair share. Guess what. The top 10 percent pay 87 percent of the income tax. Almost all of the income tax is paid by the top 10 percent. If you go to the top 50 percent--that is $75,000 and above--it is well over 90 percent. Ninety-six or ninety-seven percent of the income tax is paid for by people who make $75,000 and above. There is a young socialist on the other side who says: We need a special tax on the rich, on those who make $10 million a year. You have heard this. Even Republicans are saying: Well, yeah, let's stick it to the rich. Let's get those filthy rich people. Let's say you do it, put a 70-percent tax on those who make $10 million. Well, let's do the math. What does it bring in? Let's say they all continue to work, and let's say they all pay their taxes and don't move to another country. That will bring in $50 billion. That sounds like a lot of money. How much would Medicare for All cost? Sixty trillion dollars. All right. The tax brings in $50 billion. The spending proposal for just Medicare for All is $60 trillion. For the Green New Deal, add another $10 trillion. Their spending proposals are so big--no one can even define them within a few trillion dollars because they are so enormous. Realize what I said before: The deficit is driven by what you already have. You have Medicare for senior citizens. It is $35 trillion short. If you were $35 trillion short, does it make sense to now expand Medicare to everyone? So what we have is Medicare for Some, Medicare for senior citizens. It is $35 trillion short, and they want to expand it to everybody. Also, realize they want to ban insurance. There will be no insurance companies and no insurance through your employer. Right now, there are 180 million people who have health insurance. Do you think it is going to be a very pleasant transition to having everybody on the government insurance? Where is the money going to come from? These proposals are ludicrous on their face. We face mounting debt and deficits from what we have. This should be a no-brainer. These people should be laughed out of polite society. No one who is intellectually honest should listen to these people. There is really no reason for them to be in the discourse because they are so completely out of touch with reality. We have so much debt from what we are already trying to give you through Medicare and Social Security. These people want to double, triple, and quadruple that. It doesn't work. It is a recipe for disaster. As you look around the world, as people get more and more in debt and there is more and more spending, look what happens. Look what happens as we approach socialism around the world. If you look at the examples of socialism from the last century, it is a history of famine and genocide--Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, Maduro. It doesn't work. We actually live in the best time ever to be alive in the history of the world. Does that sound excessive? It is absolutely true. In 1800, 80 percent of people lived in extreme poverty. When I was born in the 1960s, it was down to a third of the people who lived in extreme poverty, $2 a day or less. It went from 80 percent to a third. In the span of my lifetime, it is under 10 percent. I am not talking about America; I am talking about the whole world. Less than 10 percent of the people live in extreme poverty now. You have to ask yourself why. How did we get here? Was it just an accident? Was it a fluke? Were we born with oil under the ground, and all of a sudden we got rich? For some nations, sometimes that could be true. Look at Venezuela. They have more oil under the ground, more oil deposits than any other country in the world, and socialism took the richest country in the world and made it the poorest country in the world. They are eating their pets in Venezuela. They are starving. The average person has lost 20 pounds. What does that have to do with the budget? They got overextended. Their deficit became massive even in the face of oil revenue. People say America is a rich country. Yes, we are a rich country, but we are overextended. I don't want our country to be Venezuela. When the President said America will not become a socialist nation, I took that at face value. If we don't want to be a socialist nation, we can't keep piling on the debt. What I have today is a proposal. We will see if anybody chooses it. My prediction is that not one Democrat will vote to balance the budget. They vote to hike all your taxes a million percent, which would kill the economy, and they would say: Oh, that is how we balance the budget. But they will not vote to cut any spending. They will not vote to even control spending. My budget over 10 years actually slowly increases spending over time. We keep it steady, and we cut it 1 or 2 percent for 5 years, and then we allow it to grow at 2 percent. We could do that and be a stronger country, but we have to examine the failures in history. We have to examine what has happened under socialism, Big Government, and debt in other countries and decide whether we want to go that way, decide whether we are going to simplistically say: Gimmee, gimmee, gimmee. I want something for nothing, and there is no reason I should have to work for it. It is just not fair unless you give it to me. Realize there will be a price. There is no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as something for nothing. I offer this budget to the American people, and I hope you will watch all your representatives vote. Not one Democrat will vote for it, but over half the Republicans won't vote for it either. They will say: It is too dramatic. We can't cut spending that much. One penny out of a dollar is what I have been proposing for 5 years. I usually get 15 to 20 votes. Now we have had to go up to two pennies for every dollar because nobody is really doing anything to cut spending, and spending is still exploding. So this is called the Two Penny Plan budget now. It would be 98 percent of last year. We would spend 98 percent next year of what we spent this year. I think the American people would support it. I hope the American people will pay attention today to how people vote. I urge my colleagues to vote for the Penny Plan budget. Cloture Motion

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following interns in my office be given floor privileges through June 28 of this year, 2019: Blythe Edwards, Chris Salamah, Isaac Wong, Stephen Hillenmeyer, Claire Moody, Lizzy Dawahare, Lachlan Mersky, Nick Lebert, Payton Howard, and Matthew McCall.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, in reserving the right to object, I am all for transparency. I think we should know as much about this investigation into the President as we possibly can. We do know that we only know part of the story and that the Mueller report is only part of the story. What we also need to know is how this originated because I think it is very important that we not turn our country into this back- and-forth where each successive party tries to use the apparatus of government to investigate the previous President. We do know now that the investigation of the Trump campaign reached to the highest levels of the White House, all the way up to President Obama. What we don't know is, was President Obama told that the evidence to get this investigation started was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign? We need to know that. That is not part of the Mueller report, but that is something that I am asking that we should attach to this resolution. We need to know, was President Obama told that this information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign? We do not yet know whether John Brennan was involved and to what degree. We do not know whether John Brennan colluded with British spy agencies to spy on Americans. It is illegal for our CIA to spy on Americans. We don't yet know whether John Brennan was colluding with British spy agencies and other spy agencies to get them to do his dirty work. We do know now that John Brennan, who had the power to listen to every American's phone call and who had the power to listen to every person's phone call in the entire world, is a rank partisan. We now know that John Brennan has called the President a traitor, essentially saying the President should be put to death. This is the guy who was in charge of this investigation. This isn't an objective person. We need to know about all of the communications. So I ask unanimous consent that we modify this resolution and that we find out about and gain access to all of the communications between Comey, Brennan, Clapper, the White House, and President Obama, because I don't want to ruin this great country with politically motivated investigations year in and year out. This had to do with placing spies and infiltrating the Trump campaign. Do you really think that our intelligence Agencies should be infiltrating each other's campaigns? I don't want this to happen to a Democrat. When President Trump came to the Hill a week ago, he said that this shouldn't happen to the next Democratic President. We should not misuse the power of our intelligence Agencies to have one party go after another. How can we get on with the people's business if we are allowing the government to be consumed with this kind of stuff? I ask unanimous consent that we amend the resolution and look at the entire story--not just at the investigation but at how we got here. The media wouldn't even print this fake dossier because it was so scandalous and so unverified and has turned out to be untrue. Yet this was the basis for beginning the investigation. This was the basis for doing something extraordinary--implanting spies and informants into the Trump campaign. Unanimous Consent Request Modification--H. Con. Res. 24 Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that we amend the resolution and that as the Mueller report comes forward, we also come forward with all of the communications between the people who got this started and we discover once and for all whether or not these people have misused their offices in starting this investigation.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for both sides to yield back all remaining time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object.

Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, I think we all want transparency. I think we all want reports to be revealed. We think the American people deserve to know what happened with the Russians hacking into Democratic emails and with the Russian involvement in trying to affect the outcome of our elections. I think we all want that. What do we know so far? We know that we spent $30 million to investigate this, and they have decided and concluded--after doing hundreds of interviews and thousands of subpoenas, they have concluded that President Trump did not collude with the Russians, did not conspire with the Russians, did not commit a crime with the Russians, and the President has said repeatedly he never talked to the Russians. We do know that. That is what we know so far. But now that we know that, in addition to the Mueller report, we also need to know: Was there malfeasance? Was there misuse of government power? Did President Obama's administration get involved in an election to actually try to manipulate and infiltrate the Trump campaign to entrap them or try to spread information that was incorrect? We need to know that. So I am asking the Senator by unanimous consent to accept my amendment, which would say that not only will we see the Mueller report, but we will also see the communications between John Brennan, known to have already lied to the Senate about spying on Senate computers, and James Clapper, also known to have lied to the Senate in testimony over the bulk collection of phone records, and their communications with James Comey, who is known to have illegally leaked information about this investigation to the press--that their communications become known to all of us. We need to know why they decided that the fake Russian dossier was real. The country had concluded it wasn't. No media outlet would produce the Russian dossier because it was so unverifiable. Yet the FBI head and the CIA head kept sending the dossier out to people, having it come back to them again, saying: Oh, my goodness, look at what this Senator gave us. It was what they already had that nobody was believing and nobody was discounting and now the Mueller report has said was fake, was made up. The dossier was not true, but that is what began this entire investigation. Why should we know about this? Because we don't want this to happen every 2 to 4 years. I don't care whether it is a Democrat President or Republican President. We should not waste the time of the entire country sending spies into campaigns, making false accusations, and tying the country in knots for 2 years. Tying us in knots such that people are at each other's throats and will not talk to each other because we spread this false narrative that President Trump had something to do with the Russians. It was not true. We spent $30 million and now we know it is not true. So I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be added to the current resolution. We will agree to see the Mueller report as long as the other side will agree to show us the communications that took place in deciding to promote this fake allegation against the President. We want to know whether there was misuse of their office. If that is allowed, then I will agree to the consent request. I would ask unanimous consent that my amendment be added to the Senator's resolution.

Mr. PAUL. The Senator made one point that the investigation was begun under Republicans of this dossier. The Mueller report and the Mueller aspect of this was begun under Republicans, but the actual investigation--the promoting, the passing around of the fake Russian dossier--occurred under President Obama's administration. What we need to discover and what we do not yet know is, Was President Obama involved? Was this done for partisan purposes? Was this done to try to elect Hillary Clinton? Was this done with mal intent? We need to know the truth, and to get to the truth, we need not only the Mueller report, but we need every ounce of information about the people at the very top of our intelligence community who were promoting the inclusion of this fake dossier that most American media outlets had discounted as unverifiable and that turned out to be unverifiable. We based this investigation on a lie. We should investigate who the liars were. I object.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. PAUL. We yield back all time.

Mr. PAUL. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, as I stand before you, we are facing a financial calamity that could make the last financial crisis look like the good old days. I have become aware of a committee of respected financial industry experts that has developed a Debt Default Clock, which conceptualizes the risk associated with a potential Federal debt crisis that leads to the insolvency of the government. The Debt Default Clock is the same concept as the famous Doomsday Clock, only in this case illustrating how close we are to fiscal meltdown. The Debt Default Clock has 12 factors that are used to measure the risk associated with the burgeoning Federal debt. The Clock currently stands at 4 minutes to midnight, which means that insolvency of the Federal Government is close at hand, and we have little time to act. Although the 12 criteria were developed on the basis of defining the circumstances leading to government insolvency and default, they were also created with the idea of identifying metrics that can be measured, watched, and compared over time to identify the time remaining before the sequence of insolvency and default. Eight of these factors are already in negative territory, and the others are moving in that direction. In 2010, I ran for the Senate out of concern that our out-of-control debt might finally take us off the cliff. It is frustration with rampant, deficit-financed spending that sparked the Tea Party; yet the situation continues to get worse. So I urge my colleagues to find out more about the Debt Default Clock and the role of Congress, the administration, and the States as to how each of the factors might be mitigated if the political will exists to do so before calamity hits us square in the face. Accordingly, I respectfully request that the following information related to the Debt Default Clock be printed in the Record.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, our country was founded upon the concept and in the midst of a great boycott. At the time, we were boycotting British goods and, most specifically, British tea. There is likely nothing more American than to protest, to dissent, and to boycott. In fact, our Founding Fathers--many of them, including Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty--gathered in 1773, dressed as Indians, and dumped 90,000 pounds of British tea into the harbor. Some of our Founding Fathers were actually involved with trying to smuggle and import Dutch tea to get around the rules and to get around having to be so dependent on England. But this was a boycott. The sad thing today is that we will be debating whether or not to place limitations on the First Amendment right to boycott, and we will do it because the vast majority of this body disagrees with the concept of what the people are boycotting over. I would argue that it doesn't matter what the issue is. In fact, the First Amendment is to protect issues of speech and issues of boycott that you may disagree with. I am not particularly enamored with--in fact, I don't favor--the boycott of Israel. I think Israel has been a good ally. Yet the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom to protest, and the freedom to boycott are fundamentally American. How can we give that up so easily? How can we just say: Oh, well, it is a good ally, and we don't want anybody boycotting them. We are just going to amend the First Amendment because we don't like this boycott. Our Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew what we were doing today. I stand today at Henry Clay's desk. This desk has been passed down to the Senator from Kentucky ever since he left the Senate in 1850. In 1809, before he arrived here, there was a boycott of British goods. In fact, there was an official embargo that Jefferson had put on when we were upset with what the British were doing on the high seas with confiscating our ships, and we decided to have an organized embargo, a boycott. In Kentucky, Henry Clay was still in the State legislature, and he proposed a rule saying that the legislators themselves should not wear British clothing. It was opposed by a guy named Humphrey Marshall, who was a cousin of the fourth Chief Justice John Marshall. They got into heated words, at which time Henry Clay, wearing his American homespun clothing, was confronted by Humphrey Marshall, who came in wearing what was described as garish English imports, and he called Henry Clay a demagogue for passing this legislation. Well, Henry Clay gave it right back and called him a liar, at which point the words accelerated, and they were about to come to blows when a massive 6-foot-6-inch German-American legislator jumped in between them and stopped the fight from ensuing on the floor. Henry cooled down. Henry Clay decided to apologize. He apologizes to the body and gives his apology, and Marshall jumps up and shouts back, ``It is the apology of a poltroon,'' which is an old-fashioned word for coward. Things didn't get much better after that, and Henry Clay challenged him to a duel. It was illegal--and still is illegal--to have a duel in Kentucky. So they went across the river in Louisville and fought a duel, at which time Henry Clay was wounded in the thigh. In those days, even though the laws were against dueling, you were often rewarded for dueling by getting a promotion. So the State legislature, within a week or two, elected Henry Clay to go to the U.S. Senate to represent them. So not only are boycotts a big part of our history, but this particular boycott actually elevated Henry Clay to the U.S. Senate to become one of the most famous Senators in our history. As for other famous boycotts, there was a boycott of the buses in Montgomery in 1955 and 1956. The boycott went on for 382 days. It was set off, as you will recall, by Rosa Parks' refusing to be seated in the back of the bus. But this boycott was about speech, and it was about law, and it was about justice. Now, people would say: Well, I agreed with that boycott. That is OK. It is OK to have good boycotts that I agree with, but it is not OK to have boycotts I disagree with. I will make this argument. If today this body votes to encourage this idea that legislatively we should penalize people who boycott, I will argue today that--guess what--if you can penalize boycotts you disagree with, you may well find some day that people are penalizing boycotts that you agree with. If you have the power to disallow boycotts you don't like, you are now granting to the government the power to ban boycotts that you may well like. The thing is this: Should the majority get to decide, well, that is a good boycott and that is a bad boycott, and you can say certain types of speech as long as I agree with you? No, the freedom of speech--the First Amendment--is about allowing language you don't like. It is about allowing boycotts you may not like. If you go through our history, our history is replete with boycotts, from the Boston Tea Party to the boycott around the War of 1812 of British goods, to the bus boycott in Montgomery--boycott after boycott. It is a fundamental aspect of the First Amendment. You don't believe me? Listen to the Supreme Court. In NAACP vs. Claiborne Hardware, Blacks were protesting a Whites-only store that wouldn't allow service or allow sales to Blacks. They boycotted the store, and guess what. The Supreme Court said, 8 to 0, that you can boycott, particularly if your boycott is based on speech or it is based on a political viewpoint. Now, while I don't agree with people who want to boycott Israel, if you live in our country, or wherever you live, and you don't like their policies, do you not have a right to boycott? Are we somehow going to take away your right to boycott because we disagree with what you are boycotting over? I have a short list here of a few different things that we have boycotted over, and they range, interestingly, on both sides of the coin. Most recently, people on the left who don't like President Trump have boycotted Ivanka Trump's fashion brand. A year or two ago, Christians boycotted Disney over what they considered to be liberal movies or movies they didn't appreciate because of the families depicted. In North Carolina, liberals boycotted the North Carolina transgender bathroom law. People have boycotted Chick-fil-A because the CEO was opposed to same-sex marriage. The Dixie Chicks criticized George W. Bush, and they were boycotted. It doesn't matter whether you agree with any of these boycotts. Boycotts are speech. How could we possibly boycott someone's speech? But that is what is going on. About 20 States have passed these laws, and what we are now considering before our body is putting our imprimatur--our stamp of approval--which we are going to put on these States that are penalizing boycotts. So who are some of the people that we are going to penalize? In Texas, there is a speech pathologist who has lost her job. She was working for the school system. She has been in this country 30 years. Her name is Bahia Amawai. She has been here 30 years. She is a U.S. citizen. She speaks three languages. She works with children with autism, disabilities, and speech impediments. Her contract was not renewed because they told her she had to sign a pledge that she will not boycott Israel. She also had to sign a pledge that she would never do anything economically or refrain from any action--buying a product--with anyone who does business in Israel or does business in an area they call the Israeli-controlled territory. There has been a dispute for 30 or 40 years over the West Bank, whether the Palestinians should have more autonomy, whether it should be a country, whether it should be a province of Israel, whether they should vote, whether they should not vote. This is a political debate. This woman has an opinion that she doesn't want to sign this pledge. She no longer works. We heard on the floor from one of my colleagues yesterday. He said: Well, it is the government's money. The government's money shouldn't be used to allow a boycott. Well, if you are a teacher and you get a salary, is that still the government's money after you have done your job and you have your paycheck? Should a teacher be prevented from boycotting or expressing their speech through an economic action or, really, through an economic inaction by not buying something? It is the whole idea of ``not.'' A boycott is not even doing anything. A boycott is refusing to buy someone's product. How could we possibly be in favor of that? How could we have such clouded judgment that this body, which has such historic importance, is going to vote to place a ban on freedom of speech? How could that possibly happen in our country? This woman has been denied her job. It is her main job. She worked for the school district. She had a contract. Her contract has been denied because she refuses to sign a pledge saying she will not buy a product from somebody that she disagrees with politically. How did we get here? How can we possibly even be considering such absurd limitations on the First Amendment? This one is even worse. In Arkansas, the newspaper, the Arkansas Times, routinely takes ads. That is how newspapers make money. One of the groups that advertises with them is the State university. The State university will no longer advertise with this newspaper unless they fine them first or give them some kind of penalty. They will not advertise with them unless the newspaper signs a statement saying that they will not be critical of policies in Israel. How could we possibly say to a newspaper that you can't do business with the State if you criticize a policy in Israel? How could that possibly be the American way? The vast majority of the people here, like sheep, will fall all over themselves today to vote to try to limit your right to boycott. People say you don't have a right to a job, but what if you are with a State? What if you are a teacher and that is whom you have always worked for and you have worked for the government? Can we start placing rules because the government pays you on what your political viewpoint is? Arkansas says: Well, the newspaper can do it, but they would have to pay a 20-percent penalty. So if you have certain viewpoints or you refuse to bow down to the government and bow down to the opinion the government tells you is appropriate, we will let you work for the government, but you get penalized 20 percent. Imagine when this becomes another view, when this becomes some other issue you are interested in. Probably the most famous boycott in history other than the Montgomery bus boycott over segregation was the anti-apartheid boycott that ultimately led to a change of government and a change of policy. That wasn't done with automatic weapons. That wasn't done with tanks. That wasn't done with planes and bombs. That was done by good old-fashioned protest, peaceful protest, by agreeing not to buy something. Can you imagine the State is putting into place laws that punish you for not buying something, for refusing to buy something from someone? It is galling. Will this be declared unconstitutional? Nobody knows for sure other than the men and women of the Supreme Court, but in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, eight to zero they said it was unconstitutional to ban or limit any boycott if that boycott is about speech or political views. Well, clearly that is what this is about--political views. In two of the States that have passed these laws--Kansas and Arizona--there have already been protests and court cases. In Kansas, there is a woman by the name of Esther Koontz. She is a Mennonite, and she is a math teacher. She has been a math teacher for about a decade. She has a contract with the school system to teach other teachers about teaching math and science. She said she couldn't in good conscience sign a pledge saying she would never boycott any group who originated out of Israel. What happened to her? She was fired or she couldn't continue in the job she had been in for I think a decade. Her case went to court. Guess what. The court said it is unconstitutional. You cannot limit behavior. You cannot limit employment with the government based on one's political views. So on the first challenge, it was struck down as unconstitutional. We go to Arizona. For political reasons, Mikkel Jordahl boycotts consumer goods made in Israel. This is America. You don't have to agree with what he is doing, but in America, you have the right to protest. You have the right to boycott. For 12 years, he has been doing legal services for the local county jail. They brought in his contract, and in his contract, they said: You have to pledge that you will no longer support any activities that agree with your political viewpoint that you don't like Israel's policy. He went to court. Guess what the court said. The law is unconstitutional. These laws have gone to Federal court twice--once in Kansas and once in Arizona--and have been struck down. So what is this august body going to do? We are going to take it right up, and we are going to say: By golly, keep passing these unconstitutional laws in the States. We got your back. It has already been struck down twice by two Federal district courts. The Supreme Court has said that the concept of limiting boycotts is unconstitutional. The First Amendment says that Congress can't pass a law limiting speech, and here, we are going to pass a law encouraging the limitation of speech. One of the famous boycotts was obviously the Montgomery bus boycott. The anti-apartheid boycotts were famous as well, but even if you go further back in our history to about the time of the Boston Tea Party and beyond--another boycott--you find that people were boycotting the slave trade. There were people boycotting buying sugar out of the Caribbean because they didn't want to have any of that money going to supporting the slave trade. I would argue that the right to boycott is about as fundamental a right as we have in America. It is a big part of the First Amendment. It is an important part of the First Amendment. It is a fundamental aspect of freedom to be able to dissent, to protest, even when everybody thinks you are wrong. That is what America is about--that you have the right to protest and that the government will not squelch your speech. How did we get to this point where flippantly today we are going to encourage States to put limitations on the First Amendment? I don't know how we got here. When we look at the First Amendment--and some will say: Well, you know, this is just the State government. We are just allowing States' rights. Well, here is the thing about States' rights: Ever since the civil rights era, we have decided that the Bill of Rights applies to the States. The 14th Amendment, going all the way back to the time of the Civil War, incorporated the 1st Amendment. Many of the boycotts have actually been in favor of civil rights. Just because this one is a boycott about something else that you may or may not like or may or may not support doesn't mean we should place limitations on it. If we begin to do this--it is a road that some may say is paved with good intentions--we will be headed toward a time where speech will be regulated by our government, where the idea of dissent and the idea of protest will be judged on whether people think or the majority of the body thinks that the protest is in order, whether the majority of the body thinks you should be allowed to protest. How un-American. I can't think of anything more un-American than trying to limit the ideas and actions of a boycott. I remember when I was in college, the women of the Southern Baptist Convention said they didn't like pornographic magazines out in the open where kids could see them. They didn't even ask the legislature for a law. They actually did better than asking the legislature for a law; they simply marched out in front of all the convenience stores. They did it for about a month. Guess what. Convenience stores decided they didn't like people protesting and everybody talking about them, so they put the magazines behind the counter. That is the American way. Nobody forced them to do it; they did it under public protest and public pressure. The idea that we want to pass a law today that says to the States: Oh, we like the First Amendment, but if we don't like what they are saying and we don't like what they are protesting, it is OK to punish these people. It is OK to say to the woman in Texas who feels very strongly about this issue in Israel that she can't be employed anymore by the school district because of her political views. I can't imagine that this is isn't going to be struck down by the Supreme Court. In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, the Supreme Court was unanimous--eight to zero. How did we get here? I would say that I hope my colleagues will listen to the debate and that there will be a spirited debate on the First Amendment, but don't hold your breath. You can see there is no one here other than me. They won't listen. The hope is that the American people will listen and say: How did we vote to send people to Washington who are so careless with the Constitution that they are willing to vote to ban boycotting, that they are willing to vote for something that has already been struck down by two Federal district courts, something that has already been ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court, and they are going to go ahead and vote anyway because they don't like this particular boycott? The First Amendment isn't about popular speech; the First Amendment is about protecting unpopular speech. My hope is that across America, people are listening and that they will call their representatives today, call their Senators and say: How could you? How dare you take the First Amendment, crumple it up, and say ``Oh, today we are going to limit the First Amendment to only boycotts we approve of. We are going to limit it to speech we approve of.'' What a disgrace. What a terrible day in our history, that we are going to take the First Amendment, crumple it up, stomp on it, and simply say: Oh, we are afraid of that speech, so we are going to ban it. I think it has the opposite effect. I think it only encourages the protest. What I would say to my colleagues is, think long and hard today before you vote to place limitations on the First Amendment.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I compliment President Trump on being bold enough and strong enough to do something no President has contemplated in decades, Republican or Democratic, and that is to end the war in Afghanistan. We have been there for 17 years. We voted on a resolution initially that said we would go after the people who attacked us on 9/11 and anyone who aided or abetted them. We did that. Today there is no one living who attacked us on 9/11 or who is free. There is no one living who aided or abetted the people who attacked us on 9/11. By any measurement, we are victorious. We killed bin Laden. We have disrupted the terror camps in Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan a mess? Sure, it is a mess. It has always been a mess and always will be a mess, but now our mission has changed to nation-building. I compliment President Trump for being bold and brave in saying enough is enough. Let's spend that money at home. We spend $51 billion a year in Afghanistan. That money could be spent at home. I have three members of my family who are in the military. I don't want them to go to Afghanistan. Every one of our political and military leaders-- Republican, Democratic, and Independent--will tell you there is no military mission in Afghanistan. Yet we stay. Some of the very same people who say we have no mission, in their next breaths say we need to send more troops there. We sent 100,000, and we completely had victory. Then they came back as our troops came down. Are we to send 100,000 and keep them there forever? This resolution is an insult to the President, and I will oppose it. This resolution has been put forward by Republicans, who say to President Trump: You are leaving precipitously from Afghanistan. How do you leave precipitously after 17 years? We are no longer fighting anyone who attacked us on 9/11. The people we are fighting were not even born when 9/11 happened. The war over there has nothing to do with 9/11. It has to do with nation-building. I will tell you what one Navy SEAL, whom I met a year or two ago, told me. He said: We will go everywhere. We will kill our enemy. We will do what you ask of us, but the mistake is when you ask us to stay, plant the flag, and become policemen. They don't want to be policemen. Our military members do not want to be the policemen of the world. We fight when we have to, and we should come home. That money should be spent here at home. I completely and vigorously oppose this condemnation of the President. They say we are leaving precipitously. We have been there 17 years. The same people in the war caucus--and they are on both sides of the aisle--will also tell you, if you announce that you are leaving in 6 months, then you are telegraphing to the enemy that you are leaving. So they don't want us to leave precipitously, but they don't want us to leave in a planned way. They have left us no way to leave. People talk about bipartisanship. What is the one thing that brings Republicans and Democrats together? War. They love it--the more the better, forever war, perpetual war. We are spending $51 billion a year in Afghanistan. We spend it on luxury hotels that are half completed. The contractors have run off with the money. One of the hotels that sits across from our Embassy serves as a place for snipers to shoot at our soldiers. We have to now patrol this half-built hotel, and the guy who was building it ran off with the money. The government we supported for a decade--the Karzai government--grew more poppy than anybody in the world. The guy's brother was a drug dealer, and his other brother was a thief and ran off with the money. Is it any wonder that the Afghan people turn away from the government we have given them? It is time to declare victory and come home. This resolution, like so many resolutions, could be misinterpreted as being another affirmation that we stay forever. So I also support language that should be added to this resolution that says: Nothing in this resolution is to be construed as an authorization for war. Why? Because we had an authorization like this about Libya that didn't give power to the government to commit war. It passed on a Thursday evening, when many Members were traveling back to their States, and President Obama, at that time, used it and said: Oh, everybody is in favor of the new war in Libya, which also turned out to be a disaster. With regard to the troops in Syria, President Trump said: I will defeat ISIS, and we will come home. Now the people are changing the mission. They say: We have to stay there until the Russians leave. We have to stay there until the Iranians leave. They have been there a long time. They are not leaving. That means we stay there forever. We have 2,000 troops compared to tens of thousands of other troops, compared to a couple hundred thousand Turkish troops along the border. Do we really want to be involved in another enormous land war in the Middle East? To what end? The great irony of this is, the war caucus on both sides--Republicans and Democrats, those who will not ever let the soldiers come home-- typically vents its anger and says: The President has unlimited power, and how dare Congress get in his way with regard to war. Here is the irony. We now have a President who wants to use his power to come home, and they are stepping in and saying: Oh, no. We need to make sure he is consulting with Congress because we want to stay at war forever, and the President wants to bring troops home. So this is a resolution to condemn the President for trying to bring troops home for the first time in 17 years. What are we spending the money on--$51 billion a year? We have spent over $6 trillion between the Iraq war and the Afghan war--$6 trillion. The $51 billion a year we are spending in Afghanistan is being spent on a luxury hotel, and we have spent $45 billion on a gas station. I think we spent about $90 million on the hotel and $45 million on the gas station. Do you know what kind of gas they pump? Natural gas. How many people have a car in America that runs on natural gas? Virtually nobody. How many people in Afghanistan have a car that runs on natural gas? Zero. So we bought them some cars. Then they didn't have any money, so we gave them credit cards so they could use the gas pumps. I sent my staffers to see if the gas station even existed, but they couldn't get there because it was too dangerous. After 17 years, you can't travel more than a few blocks in Kabul except without helicopter warships and an escort of dozens of marines. It is completely a disaster. More poppy was grown there last year than in any recent year, and the people say: We shouldn't give up. All we have to do is send more soldiers. All we have to do is fight longer. When are they going to fight? They have 300,000 people in their army. When are they going to fight? If they want their homeland, stand up and fight for it. I am tired of America always doing everybody else's fighting. I am tired of America always paying for everybody else's war. People say: Oh, they might come and attack us. We should be prepared. We should have robust intelligence. We should know what is going on, and we should disrupt terrorist camps if we have to. Yet every person out there who believes in this radical Islam, in this radical jihad is not coming over here. Every misbegotten village in Africa is not a threat to the United States, and that is the debate we should be having. They say: It is in our national security interests. Really? To go to Niger to go to Mali? to be fighting in Somalia? to be fighting in Yemen? to be fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq? That is not in our national interest. People say: We must fight them there or they will come here. Well, guess what. They have been coming here since 9/11. We have arrested over 300 terrorists in our country. It was only a year ago that a dozen people were killed in New York by a terrorist, so it is not as if they haven't been coming. In fact, we don't condone terrorists' reasons for coming, but if you look at their reasons for coming, they say it is because we are over there. So we are trapped by this platitude. This platitude is: We must fight them over there so they will not be over here. Well, they are over here, and when they tell you why they are over here, they say they are over here because we are over there. I am not saying we do nothing. I am not saying we don't have counterterrorism, but I will tell you that when in some remote village in Yemen we swoop in at night and kill 15 people, including women and children, the surrounding neighborhood and countryside, for 100 years, will speak to an old tradition of the night the Americans came. Ultimately, Islam must police Islam. They are never going to accept Americans coming in and telling them how to live or how they should behave or getting rid of even the bad elements among them. They need to step up and do it. We have taken 99 percent of the land back from ISIS. That is not enough. People say there are still suicide bombers. Yes, there will be suicide bombers in the Middle East until the end of time. If we are waiting until there are no suicide bombers in the Middle East, we will wait forever. Can the people there do nothing to take care of themselves? Is there nobody there who can stop the 1 percent from coming back? Will people not step up and fight their own wars? We have given them trillions of dollars--the uniforms, the weapons. Everything has been ours. Every time we say we have to be involved, there are unintended consequences. In Syria, we gave arms to people who were radical extremists. We gave arms to people who were actually allied with al-Qaida. Some say there is no difference between al-Qaida and the people to whom we gave arms. At one point in time, it was said that ISIS had $1 billion worth of humvees that were from the United States. The arms that were coming out of Libya--and Hillary Clinton supported taking those arms into Libya--were going to the wrong people. We were taking them to one set of bad people and giving them to another set of bad people. Maybe, sometimes, there isn't a lesser of two evils. Maybe, sometimes, we have to be concerned about America. What I am saying with this resolution is I am for replacing it completely and saying to President Trump: We think we are doing a great job, and thank goodness for being bold enough to say it is time to start thinking about America first. I ask unanimous consent that we get rid of the resolution condemning the President and that we replace it with the resolution that simply says that we applaud President Trump for being bold and brave enough to consider bringing our troops home, declaring victory, and ending America's longest war.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have 20 seconds.

Mr. PAUL. I think this is an important debate, and time will tell. This will go to the Supreme Court, and I expect the Supreme Court will rebuke this body for not carefully considering the First Amendment. Vote on Amendment No. 96

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, one of the things that I think are fundamental to our country is the freedom to protest, the freedom to dissent, and the freedom to boycott if you so choose. Our country was actually founded with a boycott. The boycott was dumping English tea into the ocean. In my State, Henry Clay was famous for passing legislation boycotting British goods so that people could wear American clothing. He actually fought a duel over that and became famous and then became one of the most famous U.S. Senators. The idea that you should be allowed to boycott, that it is an extension of your speech, that it is an extension of the First Amendment, I think goes to the very heart of who we are as a people. It is hard for me to believe that part of this bill they are putting forward would affirm State law that says you can't do business with the government if you are involved with the boycott against Israel. I am not really making a point on whether the boycott is good or bad or with regard to Israeli policy; my point is whether it is good or bad with regard to the First Amendment. You see, the First Amendment isn't really about hearing from people about things that you like. If it is speech that you like and people say you are a great guy, you are not going to be offended by that speech. It is when people are critical of you or critical of your thoughts or have different thoughts--that is what the First Amendment is about. It is an extraordinary thing in our country that people can actually speak up and speak their minds. If people don't think the settlements on the West Bank are a good idea, should they be allowed to speak their mind? Should they be forbidden from doing work for the government? The problem is that the government has gotten so big. There is a teacher in Texas who is Muslim. I think she teaches autistic or special needs kids. She is a contractor. She was asked to sign a statement saying that she would never boycott goods made in Israel. Well, she objects to some of the policies, I presume, on the West Bank. I don't agree with her, but that is a fundamentally American thing--to be able to object. Should we have a law that says you can't boycott your government and that you can't boycott your government's policy? To me, that is a real danger. I have an amendment to this overall bill that would simply say that we remove any kind of affirmation of anti-boycotting legislation, that boycotting or protesting is something so fundamentally American, so fundamentally associated with the First Amendment that even if we don't like what you are boycotting, even if we don't like what you are saying, that in America we allow that to happen because that is what freedom of speech is about. Freedom of speech is not about the easy stuff. It is not about the language you like. It is not about saying ``Oh, if you are a Republican and everybody is saying Republican things, that is fine, but we are not going to hear from Democrats,'' or if you are a Democrat, it is not about saying ``Well, the First Amendment is fine for Democrats, but we don't want to hear from those Republicans.'' It is about speech, whether you like it or not. Boycotting is speech. I went to a Baptist college. I remember when I was in college that the Baptist women of the Southwest Baptist Convention didn't like pornography being out in front at the store where kids could view it. Do you know what they did? They marched. They didn't hurt anybody. They didn't commit violence. They did nonviolent protests by marching in front of the utility stores until--guess what--because of the economic boycott and the bad press, the people put the pornographic magazines behind the counter, and only adults were allowed to buy them and look at them. That is from a boycott. We boycotted English tea to found a country. Does anybody remember the boycotts in Montgomery? Rosa Parks didn't like the fact that she was being separated and told to sit in the back of the bus, so African Americans from around the country but definitely across Alabama and Montgomery boycotted the bus system. Are we here to say that we are going to forbid boycotting, that you can't do business with the government? Here is the problem. People say: Oh, it is a privilege to do business with the government. What if you are a physician and half of your business is with the government? What if you are a nurse? Half of the healthcare in our country is paid for by the government. What if you are a teacher and you work in the public schools? Are we going to ask all of these people to take a litmus test that they are not going to boycott or protest against their government's policy? What kind of country would we live in? Yet it is groupthink around here. Everybody is so paranoid and saying: Oh, we can't object to this lobby. Because this lobby is so powerful, we can't object to them. Look, it isn't about the ideas; it is about the freedom of speech. I ask unanimous consent that my amendment be put forward, which is a germane amendment. Listen to what you will hear here. There is going to be an objection. They are not going to let me vote on this. So not only are they going to ban boycotting, they are banning the idea that, in the Senate, we would vote on whether we would allow boycotting in our country. My amendment is to take out the language that supports banning boycotts and reaffirms the First Amendment. It will be denied because nobody wants to vote on this. Nobody wants to have a debate over the First Amendment. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside the pending amendment and call up my germane amendment that has everything to do with the bill, amendment No. 102.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, today President Trump announced that we have won the war against ISIS in Syria. Our troops are coming home. Thank you, Mr. President. The Syrian civil war is largely over, but Syria is a mess and desperately needs reconstruction. These sanctions will delay--and possibly prevent--the reconstruction of Syria and the beginning of a healing time. Now is the time for diplomacy. There are many actors--including Russia, Iran, Turkey, the United States, and others--but this is the time for diplomacy, not for new sanctions. So I object.