Rand Paul

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. I object.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we are talking about a trillion-dollar deficit.

Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, a trillion-dollar Republican deficit--the hypocrisy is astounding. Every one of these Republicans complained about President Obama's deficits. Yet now we have them out there bragging and pushing and doing everything they can to get their trillion-dollar deficit through. I object.

Mr. PAUL. We are spending money like it is out of control. This bill will have a trillion-dollar deficit, as bad or worse than any of President Obama's. So what I ask my Republican colleagues is, Why are we doing this when we condemned it on the other side?

Mr. PAUL. I object.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I think it is very important that the American people know why we are here this evening, and why we are here is because Washington is completely broken.

Mr. PAUL. So as you look at the war in Yemen and you go back and forth and you say ``What are the results of getting involved in this civil war?'' it may well be that al-Qaida gets stronger. If you look at what happened in Syria, the neoconservatives went crazy and said: We should support the moderates in Syria who are fighting against Assad. Well, it turns out the moderates in Syria were al-Qaida-linked, ISIS-linked jihadists. In fact, with one group the neocons said that we must give weapons to, it turned out that as soon as they got anti-tank weapons from us, they said--and this is a quote from one of the leaders days after they got anti-tank weapons from us: When we are done fighting Assad--not ISIS, Assad--we are going to attack Israel to take back the Golan Heights. We did this, and we pumped millions of dollars and hundreds of tons of weapons into Syria, and it didn't work. When we finally quit doing the funding and sending of weapons, that is when the Kurds rose up, with our help, and actually did a much better job. The thing is, there is a perpetual war crowd that ignores the Constitution, and they will say that we should be at war everywhere, and we don't need to vote on it. One, that is a terrible insult to our forefathers and a terrible insult to the Founding Fathers, but as you look at this and you look at the debate, it is also incredibly draining to the Treasury and often has unintended consequences. As we got involved in the Syrian civil war, the so-called moderates-- many of them jihadists, many of them al-Qaida; the fiercest fighters actually were more al-Qaida linked, al-Nusra--began pushing back on Assad, and there was chaos. Guess who arose in the chaos there: ISIS. So really ISIS became a result of or at least was accentuated by our intervention in Syria, and then we had to go back in and fight ISIS. Here is a scenario that could happen in Yemen. We decide we are going to go into Yemen and we are going to support the Sunni extremists, whom the Saudis are for, against the Houthi extremists, whom Iran is for. But in the chaos, perhaps al-Qaida rises again, and we have to get more heavily involved. I think there is no end to the idea that we are going to kill a terrorist group in the middle of the desert in Yemen and, somehow, there will not be more. I will give you an example of how sometimes what we get involved with actually backfires and causes more terrorists to arise. We have been feeding the Saudi planes bombs. We probably have sold them the bombers as well. But we have been feeding them bombs, we have been helping them with targeting, and it turns out they have been targeting civilians. They targeted a funeral procession. The Saudi bombs that we gave them-- we paid for and we gave them; they may have paid for them indirectly, but with the Saudi bombs that are U.S. bombs, they ended up bombing in Yemen a funeral procession and killing about 150 people who were unarmed and wounding 500. You say: Oh, well, I don't care what they think. I don't care what their response is. Well, think about what their response might be and then decide whether you care, and I am not saying I am sympathetic to the people. I don't know the people enough to be sympathetic or not, but I am aware of their response to being bombed in a funeral procession. My guess is that 1,000 years from now, the people and their families will, through oral tradition, remember the bombing of the funeral procession. I am not kidding you. These people have a long memory. The Sunnis and the Shia have been fighting for 1,000 years. They remember the massacre at Karbala. I promise you they still celebrate when one side massacred the other, and that was at least 500 to 600 years ago-- maybe more. So there is a long memory going on in this, and we have to decide whether it is more beneficial to kill one of them than to have the result of 10 new terrorists created by that. The thing is, they are everywhere. There is a branch of Islam that is radical and that does wish our demise and wish us harm, but we have to decide what the best way of containing this is. What is the best way of defending our country? If you look at it, what I think you will find is that there have been a great deal of unintended consequences. One is an enormous drain on the Treasury, but two is a lot of unintended consequences as far as sometimes actually making it worse. I think our intervention in Syria actually exacerbated the rise of ISIS. I think our intervention in Yemen could well exacerbate or cause or allow the rise of al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula again. It is confusing when you ask: What do the soldiers want? The only soldiers who are allowed to speak are the ones at the very top or those who are retired. Even at the very top, most generals who are still active can't give a full opinion. They may give it to the administration but typically not on television or to the public. But the average soldier really is never asked for his or her opinion. I understand that, and I understand the role of the order of the military--that you have to take orders. The interesting thing is, as you meet the average soldier--I promise you this is true. If people were able to do this and we were able to actually take a poll of thousands and thousands of ordinary soldiers, I think you could ask them: Do we still have a purpose in Afghanistan? Are you ready for another deployment? You have been on six deployments to Afghanistan. Are you excited about the next deployment? Freedom is going to ring out in Afghanistan. They are going to be a great, self- sufficient country, and we will have won the war. I think most of the soldiers who have been there will actually tell you the opposite. I have met dozens and dozens and dozens of these soldiers who have come home and actually are unclear now as to what our motives are. They are unclear as to what our goal is, and they are unclear as to what the end result is. We had two Under Secretaries recently in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. One was Under Secretary of Defense and another was Under Secretary of State. One of the Senators asked them: How many Taliban are there? How many people are we fighting? They seem like pretty honest questions. He said: You don't have to tell me the exact number. Tell me about how many we are fighting. Neither one of them knew. They said: We have to wait until fighting season, and then we will find out. Well, any time you are in a situation where there is a fighting season--and every year there is a fighting season--maybe that indicates this is a perpetual war that is not going to end. But neither of these guys knows whether there are 100,000 Taliban or there are 10,000 Taliban. Interestingly, for the neocons who think this is going to end like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there will be unconditional surrender, it will never end that way. Even Secretary Mattis--when I have asked him ``Will there ultimately be negotiation with the Taliban?''--says that actually there will be. The Under Secretary of the Department of Defense, in our meeting, said that the goal was to push them toward negotiation. Here is the interesting thing about Afghanistan. We have had as many as 100,000 troops--President Obama, who ran on a message of having less war and less involvement and was mercilessly criticized by the Republican side, actually escalated the war in Afghanistan to a great degree. So President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan, and what happened? The enemy melted away. I am sure we killed some. We won some battles, but they sort of melted away into our good ally Pakistan, for the most part. But then they come back, and people say: We left too early. Well, how long are we going to stay? Are we going to stay forever? We put in 100,000 troops, and it temporarily pacified Afghanistan. After we brought the troops down, now the Taliban control maybe one- third--some say maybe half--of the territory. You say: Well, if we leave, the Taliban will take over. Well, how long is it going to take until the Afghans step up and fight for themselves? One of the biggest problems we have had is infiltration of the Afghan Army and their actually shooting us on the base. It is ostensibly not the soldiers; it is people from the enemy who have infiltrated. At the same time, there has been such enormous corruption there. When Karzai ruled Afghanistan, his brother was accused of being in the drug trade. My good friend, Thomas Massie from the House of Representatives, often says that we spent $8 billion eradicating their poppy crop. Poppy is the plant they use to make heroin. They had their best crop last year, so something is not working. He often comments that for $8 billion he could buy a lot of Roundup and probably do a better job. But the thing is, we are aren't doing a very good job. The mission doesn't seem to have the purpose that it once had. Look, if I had been here, I would have voted to go there after 9/11. We needed to disrupt the terrorist networks, we needed to punish them, and we needed to make sure they couldn't attack us again. It was a noble endeavor, but there has to be an end. I think part of our problem is that we are unsure how to define victory, so we never can have it. There was a proposal to have a big military parade, and many of my friends who have served in the military were a little bit worried about that because the image has been somewhat an image we have seen more in totalitarian governments than in our own. We really haven't had a habit of it, but I was looking at a story, and it said that we did have a big parade after we had won the first Iraq war, and the troops did parade through. I am not completely against having a parade necessarily, but my suggestion is this: Why don't we bring the 14,000 troops home from Afghanistan, declare victory, and have a parade because then there really would be something to celebrate--bringing those 14,000 troops home. I think if we were involved in less war, we could pay our troops better. We have an enormous number of veterans retiring after 15, 16 years. We have never been at war constantly for 16 years. We have a lot of veterans who have been wounded, and to take care of them, it is going to take enormous resources. All of us want to provide those resources, but the thing is, if we continue in this perpetual war mode, are we eventually going to run out of money so that we can't even take care of our own veterans? What we are really looking at tonight is a trillion-dollar deficit, and I do think that deficit really does threaten our national security. I think our foreign policy threatens our national security in the sense that there are things that we need to upgrade. We need to take care of our nuclear arsenal. We need to take care of our bombers. We need to have the most modern planes and technology, but we often can't have them because we are involved in so many wars. People talk about the Romans getting overextended. We are everywhere, and we always think somehow it is our responsibility to take care of everything. I think that in many parts of the world, particularly in Afghanistan, they see--since Genghis Khan, people have been going across Afghanistan, conquering it, going back across it, and then somebody new comes. But each time the indigenous people have been strong enough to ward off and eventually get rid of their attackers. Their attackers wear out. It is the same way now. Some of the people like our being there. Some of them have been honest, upright, good people. Some have been crooks. Karzai and his family were involved in the drug trade. The other problem is this--and this is a real problem that the other side fails to acknowledge. Afghanistan is not really a country. Afghanistan is an area of Central Asia that Westerners drew a line around in the late teens or twenties; it may have been 1922. We draw this line around Afghanistan, and we call it a country, but it is not really a country. The far western part speaks Farsi or is related, in many ways, to the Iranian people and has more in common with them. The northern tribes have more in common with the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and different nationalities to the north. The Pashtuns are on both sides of the Pakistan border. If you ask any of these disparate people whom their allegiance is to, they will tell you, primarily, their allegiance is to their local warlords, the local elders, or local council, but they don't have much allegiance to Kabul. They have never really seen themselves as subservient to the capital. So when we go there and say we are going to create a nation, it isn't a nation that can be created because they are people who may not want be to part of a nation. Iraq has a little of the same thing. You have the Sunni-Shia split that is 1,000 years old. You have people who aren't necessarily that comfortable under the yoke of one country. So as we try to force them in together and try to have them dominate, what you find in a lot of these areas is that you end up having a strongman, and the strongman rules with an iron fist. This was Saddam Hussein. The interesting thing about world politics and balance of power is, when we went in and toppled Saddam Hussein--let freedom ring--we actually made it more difficult for us in the world, and we made the Middle East more unstable because Iran and Iraq fought a fierce 8-year bloody war. They had come to somewhat of a standstill. Saddam Hussein, for all his warts, was somewhat of a counterbalance to Iran. So when Iraq was toppled and Saddam Hussein was gone, you once again have a power vacuum. In a power vacuum, al-Qaida will fill it and did. You upset the balance of power between Iran and Iraq, and now Iran seems to be more threatening throughout the region. As we look at our spending, without question, there is part of the spending that isn't in this bill--the mandatory spending. For those who say: Oh, we are not going to do anything for the part of the bill we are actually voting on, and we are OK with the trillion-dollar deficit, I think there is sort of a litmus test. It is a litmus test of hypocrisy. If they were against trillion-dollar deficits for President Obama, why is it OK to have a Republican deficit of a trillion dollars? There is no escaping the hypocrisy of that. I think there is also no escaping the dire warnings we heard. Almost all of the Republicans--I venture to say every Republican in the Senate--has made dire warnings about the debt, which was critical of President Obama. I was one of them, but we need to be honest enough to look in the mirror at ourselves when we are in charge of all three branches of government. When the Republicans took over the House, they said: Well, don't have too high expectations. We only control one-half of one-third of the government. Then we took over the Senate, and they said: Well, we still can't do anything because President Obama is there. Now, we have a Republican President. I don't know what the excuse is going to be. Some say: Well, we must govern. If by govern, they mean act like the other side and run up huge deficits, I guess it is not what I am interested in as far as governing. Governing is about making tough choices. I think what has happened in our country--because we basically have a printing press, a Federal Reserve that replenishes and pays our debt, buys our debt simply by creating money and buying Treasury bills with it or Treasury bonds--is that we have sort of a limitless notion of debt. That is what has been going on. We keep adding to it. To a large extent, we haven't had a catastrophe. I think we were close in 2008. Some of that is related to accumulation of debt. I think you also will see some of that in the near future. There is an unsettling notion out there--the stock market, having risen so far, so fast, you are seeing this jittery notion out there. There is the worry about interest rates. There is the worry that historically we funded this massive debt at about 2 percent interest. What happens if we get back to more normalized rates of interest? I think this is an important debate. It is important to get also back to the crux of the debate. What I have been arguing for tonight is that we have amendments. The most important job the Congress does is to pass spending bills. It is the most important thing we do, and the most important oversight we have. If we are to do that oversight, we should have a debate. We should have amendments. What we are looking at is a bill that was decided in secret--700 pages that were printed last night at midnight--and, for the most part, it has not been read. It is very easy not to have a full understanding of a bill that is nearly 700 pages that comes forward, but within the midst of this, we know a couple of things. We have gotten rid of fiscal responsibility. There were spending caps put in place to try to control spending. For a couple of years--2011, 2012, 2013--we were actually seeing a slowdown on the rate of growth of spending. You heard everybody squawking about this sequester. The sequester is so bad. The interesting thing about sequester is it wasn't a cut in spending. It was a slowdown of the rate of spending, a slowdown of the rate of growth of spending. If you look at curves over a long period of time--actually the rate of growth--you still had government growing, but we slowed down the rate of growth. As revenue was picking up, we actually were whittling away, at least a little bit, at the annual deficit. Then the cries came that were, actually, mostly from my side. They said the military is being hollowed out. We have to have more military money. The dirty little secret around here is you can only get more military money if you give the other side more welfare money. We have warfare and welfare. That is guns and butter. It has been going on a long time. We spent a lot of money, and both sides have now agreed to do this. The leadership has agreed to do this. In this spending bill, what you are going to have is a looting of the Treasury, basically. Both sides are really culpable. Both sides are somewhat equally responsible for this bill and for the debt that will ensue. The real question has to be--I think most importantly for my side--if you were against President Obama's trillion-dollar deficits, why are you for trillion-dollar deficits when you put a Republican name on it? I think people are going to see through this. You are already seeing some of the clips in the media putting forward the comments from 2010 and 2011 about President Obama's debt. These are comments coming from Republicans who are now for this bill. As they say in some parts of the country, you have some explaining to do. That is the question. Are people going to look at this and say: My goodness, is everybody out there just a partisan politician and all they care about is party; and that the debt is bad when it is a Democratic debt and not bad when it is a Republican debt? That is sort of what we are facing. My recommendation is that we really look long and hard at this. Most of the Senators will say: This is the last one. I am never voting for this again. These are terrible. This is a rotten way to run your government. I object to doing it this way. I will vote for this one because I don't want the government to shut down. I don't want the government to shut down. I also don't want to keep it open if we are not going to reform it. It is damned if you do; damned if you don't. We could have done better. We could have moved forward with a responsible spending package that had amendments that we could all offer on the floor--an open amendment process and debate. We chose not to go that way. That is why we are here. Some will say: You are responsible for this. It is all your fault. If I am responsible for drawing attention to the debt, so be it. Somebody has to do it. I didn't come up here to be part of somebody's club. I didn't come up here to be liked. I didn't come up here to just say: Hey, guys, I want to be part of the club so I am going to always vote with whatever you tell me to do. I have often voted with Democrats. I have often voted with Republicans. I probably have two dozen bills I cosponsored with Democrats. I am also seen as one of the most conservative Members of the Senate. I think there is a way you can have bipartisanship. Bipartisanship doesn't mean you have to give up on everything you believe in. That is what this spending bill is. It is a bipartisan spending bill that gives up on everything that Republicans ostensibly believe in as far as deficit, debt, and spending. I will vote against this bill. I will continue to advocate. If they want to vote earlier, they can vote earlier, as long as I get a vote on an amendment where we would have an open debate and an explicit vote that says: Are you for or against breaking the spending caps that we put in place? Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. PAUL. Reserving the right to object, it seems like a lot of work for a trillion-dollar deficit.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the government listening to your phone calls, reading your emails, or reading your text messages without a warrant. It doesn't mean the government will never do this, but it means they would have to ask a judge. They would have to ask a judge if they have probable cause that you committed a crime. They would have to name you. They would have to name the information they want. It is called the Fourth Amendment. All Americans deserve the protection of the Fourth Amendment. In fact, I believe it was John Adams who said that James Otis's argument against blanket warrants, against generalized warrants that they called writs of assistance--he said that the argument James Otis made in the 1760s was the spark that led to the American Revolution. Lincoln is said to have written that any man can stand adversity, but if you want to challenge a man or a woman, give them power. Over almost 1,000 years, the history of Western civilization has been the struggle to contain the power of the monarch, the struggle to contain and maintain the power of the government in every form. From Magna Carta on, it has been the people trying to take power back from either the monarchy or a despotic government. We get to the formation of our government, and Jefferson wrote that the Constitution would be the change, that the government would be bound up in the change. Patrick Henry wrote that the Constitution is meant to restrain the government, not the people. It is about trying to restrain government from abusing the power to take our rights. You have a fundamental right to be left alone. Justice Brandeis put it this way. He said that the right most cherished among civilized men and women is the right to be left alone. But we know also that the history of those who grab the reins of power, the history of those who take up the mantle of power is a history of abuse. In World War I, President Wilson arrested 10,000 Americans because of their objection to the war. FDR had an enemies' list that he actually was very vocal about and published in newspapers. There were 77 people who were his enemies, and he used the IRS to go after them. LBJ illegally spied on Martin Luther King. We just had Martin Luther King Day yesterday. LBJ spied on him illegally in all manners and in all forms. They spied on Vietnam war veterans. Nixon had an enemies' list. You name it--President after President has abused this power. President Obama had a fight with the tea party groups. It turns out that if you registered as a tea party group, you were given extra scrutiny. And people were denied being allowed to form as a charitable group or political activist group under President Obama because they disagreed with President Obama. We now have a current administration where there have been accusations of people in the FBI having a personal animus against this President and conspiring and discussing how they could block him. We have had members of the Department of Justice who were married to people doing opposition research on President Trump, paid for by the opposition candidate, by Hillary Clinton. Without question, that power has been abused and will always be abused. It was Lord Acton who said that ``power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' The history of our country is about trying to restrain the power of government. Realize that we have the ability to collect all of the phone calls in Italy in 1 month. There was a story saying that we did it, that we collected every phone call from Italy. Who gets trapped in that? If you collect everyone's phone call in Germany or everyone's phone call in Jordan, who gets caught in that? Many, many innocent, legitimate Americans get caught up in the other end of phone calls because it is not just the phone calls of terrorists, it is everybody's phone calls. They are all being vacuumed up, and innocent Americans are caught up in that. Senator Wyden has been a leader in asking tough questions on the Intelligence Committee. Are there communications that are purely between two people in America that somehow get caught up in this database? He has been given a variety of answers on this, but we suspect that Americans talking to Americans in this country are caught up in this database. Should the government be allowed to search this database to prosecute you for not paying your taxes or for a minor marijuana violation? Absolutely not. Why? Because this information is gathered without a warrant. It is gathered without any constitutional protection. As others have said, we actually are OK with a lower standard for gathering foreign intelligence. We acknowledge that the Constitution doesn't apply to everybody in the world. But if Americans get caught up in that, Americans deserve the protection of the Constitution. Some on the other side have started saying: Well, it is lawfully gathered, so it could be used for any lawful purpose. That is the most ridiculous argument I have ever heard. It is gathered lawfully for foreigners, and we made the standard zero. There is no constitutional protection. We never said that we are going to gather foreigners' information, put it in a big pool, mix it up with Americans' information, and then type your name in--John Smith--and then find out whom you have been talking to. Realize that they could listen to your conversation, then they could bring you in for an interview with the FBI, and if you say anything in the interview that contradicts what they eavesdropped on in your conversation, you have now committed a felony. Do you really want all of your phone calls recorded and then the government to have the ability to bring you in and ask you questions about your phone calls? And if you are not perfectly accurate in recalling your phone calls, you could go to prison. All we are asking is that, for Americans, the Constitution should be in order. We should not get rid of the Constitution. We shouldn't throw it out. The Constitution should protect us all. We take an oath of office to defend the Constitution. Our soldiers take the same oath of office. Wouldn't it be sad if our soldiers came home from fighting and defending the Constitution to learn that we gave up on it while they were gone? The sad state of affairs here is that the majority doesn't want any debate. They want to ram this through with no amendments. Senator Wyden and I have worked for months on amendments and on an alternative bill which actually reauthorizes the program. Senators Leahy and Lee have another bill that is similar that replaces the program. None of us are for ending the program. All we are saying is that if you want to look at an American's information, you have to get a warrant. People say it will slow us down. All of our bills have an emergency exception. If they declare an emergency, they can look at the information and get the warrant the next day. We hope that would be extraordinary and not the norm. The thing is, we want the program to work, but we don't want Americans caught up in it. I hope Senators will think this through. This will not kill the program. They are going to scare you to death and say: Tomorrow, we are all going to die. The world is going to be taken over by terrorists if we don't have this. If we win this vote tonight, they will be negotiating within an hour and will come to a compromise that allows the Constitution to protect Americans. That was our oath of office. That is what we should do. I urge a vote against the bill in its current fashion.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the question is, Do deficits matter? We often say they do. You will hear Republicans say they do, and for the last week or two, you have heard from Democrats that they were against cutting taxes because it might add to the deficit. Well, if this is true, tonight we will get a chance to vote on the deficit because, you see, Congress about 6 years ago, put something forward called pay-go budget caps. What does that mean? They kept seeing the deficit explode. So they put in these budget caps, and if we were to adhere to them, we would actually get the debt under control. Guess what. Congress has evaded them 29 times. So tonight we will have a bill, and it will be the 30th time that Congress has evaded their own rules on the debt. Is it any surprise that the debt under George W. Bush went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion? Is it any surprise that under President Obama it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion? Is it any surprise that the debt continues to rise? No, because both parties are responsible for it. Look, I was all for the tax cut. I think it is good for the country, but I am also for restraining spending. So we did the tax cut earlier in the week, and now we are going to do a spending bill. We have rules in place, and the rules in place say that there are budget caps. So they have a special little waiver that they have put in the spending bills because we are now going to exceed those caps. So the question is, Are we serious about the debt? Are we serious about adding a million dollars a minute to the debt? That is what happens. We borrow a million dollars a minute. The deficit this year will be over $700 billion--$20 trillion in total. The total debt is bigger than our entire economy. So both sides give lip service to it, and yet both sides want more spending. On the Republican side, this year's request is $80 billion above the caps for military. On the Democratic side, they say: Well, you don't get yours unless we get ours. Yet nobody cares about the debt. So really the debt is being driven by the GOP, who want more military money but the only way they can get it is giving the Democrats more welfare money. So the interesting thing about this vote is--you have heard the other side of the aisle saying it--they can't vote for the tax cut because of the debt. If they care about the debt, let's cut spending. This is their chance. This will be a vote on cutting spending. These pay-go budget caps were put in place by the Democrats when they were in the majority in 2010. These are their budget caps, and yet everybody is clamoring to waive them on both sides. We have a real problem in our country, and we must do something about it. Ultimately, there will be a day of reckoning. You cannot continue to borrow so much money. Ultimately, it bankrupts the Nation, or the currency becomes worthless, or you get to a point where the interest on the debt actually becomes the No. 1 spending item. Within about a decade, interest will push out all other spending, and it will be the No. 1 item. We will spend more on interest than national defense. We will spend more on interest than welfare and anything else. So there are those who say: Well, we have to have more money for military; we have to have more money for welfare. You are going to have none of that if you keep spending money at this rate because we are going to ruin the country through debt. So can we have a strong military? Yes. We spend about $600 billion, but you can't necessarily spend $700 billion. That extra $100 billion is making the debt worse. But it is the same on the other side of the ledger with the Democrats. So we have a chance. There really is a chance. The media would say: Oh, you are irresponsible for voting for the tax cuts. No, you are irresponsible if you are not also willing to vote for spending cuts. So tonight I will put forward in a few minutes a motion, and this motion will be to say that we should obey the spending caps. We have put them in place. Unless our outrage over debt is fake outrage, if we truly care about the debt, we should vote to keep in place the rules we have put in place. These are spending caps. If we care about the next generation, we should vote for the spending caps. So I will put forward a motion that says: Let's obey our own rules. It will be interesting to watch the vote and to see how it turns out--who truly cares about the debt on either side of the aisle, who is willing to say: You know what; I am for tax cuts but I am also for saying across the board that we need to have spending restraint. Will we obey our own rules? We have broken our own rules. This will be the 30th time we broke our own rules on budget caps since 2010. If you go back farther, it is in the hundreds of times. If you were scoring Congress on integrity and honesty about the rules we have set up, it would be a zero. We aren't adhering to our own rules. So what I would admonish my colleagues to do is, if they care about debt, is to vote for this point of order that says that we should adhere to our budget caps and we should really truly care about the budget deficit. Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the question is, Do deficits matter? We have had a lot of debate over deficits and people complaining that tax cuts add to deficits. Well, tonight we will have a vote on whether we should honor what are called pay-go budget caps. We have had these in place for about 6 years. Congress has disobeyed their own rules 30 times as of tonight. These budget caps would keep spending in order. Yet we are going to have them waived tonight. My budget point of order would actually say that we should not waive these budget caps. We should honor them because deficits do matter. We borrow $1 million a minute. The deficit this year will be over $700 billion. The overall debt is $20 trillion. We have a spending problem. We have rules to keep spending in check, and we disobey our own rules. With that, I make a point of order on the statutory pay-go scorecard that says we should spend within certain limits. This budget point of order is pursuant to section 306 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, there have been many who have said, including Admiral Mullen, among others, that the greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We have a $20 trillion debt. This year, the debt for 1 year will be about $700 billion. We borrow $1 million a minute. What we have before us is a bill that will exceed our spending caps. We will be told that this is an emergency and we must do it. Yet I think the true compassion comes from helping those but also making sure we don't add to our debt. I think the truly compassionate person helps their neighbor by giving part of their surplus to their neighbor but not going to the bank and borrowing money to give it to their neighbor. We are $700 billion short in the budget, and we are simply going to print more money and send it to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida. What I ask is, if you are going to help people, why don't we set our priorities? Why don't we take money from other areas of the budget where it is not needed? What I propose is that we cut 1 percent or a little bit less than that across the board. I think there is not a department of government that couldn't deal with 1 percent less, and we would take that money and we could spend it on the emergencies in Puerto Rico and Texas. I think if we think somehow that it is compassionate to go ahead and just borrow more money and continue doing this, I think we are fooling ourselves. I think our country becomes weaker each day we add to the debt, and I think it is time we become honest with ourselves. If you look at whose fault this is, there is enough blame to go around, frankly. The debt doubled under George W. Bush from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. The debt then doubled again from $10 trillion to $20 trillion under President Obama. We are on course to add, some estimate, another $10 to $15 trillion over the next 8 years. This is a real problem for our country. So I think, as we look toward helping those who suffer from the hurricanes, we should look toward taking it away from less pressing priorities. There is also $16 billion in here for the flood program that continues to pay people to build in flood zones. We do it year after year after year. We continue to rebuild in flood zones, and then the taxpayers are left on the hook. So we are wiping out $16 billion in debt for the flood program, and we are also then spending money we don't have. At this point, what I would like to do is raise a point of order that has to do with us exceeding the spending caps. I think, if we are going to be honest with ourselves--we are in the midst of talking about a large tax cut, which I favor, but how can we be the party or the people who cut taxes at the same time we continue to borrow more? So what I am asking, through this budget point of order, is that we actually adhere to our rule to not exceed our spending caps and try to slow down the accumulation of debt. With that, I raise the section 314(e) point of order, pursuant to the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, against sections 304, 306, 308, and 309 of the Additional Supplemental Appropriations for Disaster Relief Requirements Act of 2017.

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, we currently have a $20 trillion debt. Now, we might ask ourselves, whose fault is it, Republicans or Democrats? The easy answer is both. Both parties are equally responsible, equally culpable, and equally guilty of ignoring the debt, ignoring the spending problem, and really I think allowing our country to rot from the inside out. This year, the deficit will be $700 billion, for just 1 year for our country, $700 billion. We borrow about $1 million a minute. Under George W. Bush, the debt went from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. Under President Obama, it went from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. It is doubling under Republicans and Democrats. Right now, we are in the midst of another spending frenzy. People will say: Well, we are spending the money for something good. We are going to help those in Puerto Rico, in Texas, and in Florida. My point is, if we are going to spend money to help someone in need, maybe we should take it from another area of spending that is less in need. I think that just simply borrowing it--even for something you can argue is compassionate--is really foolhardy and may make us weaker as a nation. Admiral Mullen put it this way. He said: The No. 1 threat to our national security is our debt. In fact, most people who follow world politics--while we do have problems around the world--don't really see us being invaded anytime soon by an army or an armada, but people do see the burden of debt. So what we have before us is a bill, $36 billion, much of it going to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida. My request is very simple: We should pay for it. About 1 month ago, we had $15 billion for the same purposes. We are set, in all likelihood, to have over $100 billion spent on these hurricanes. I simply ask that we take it from some spending item that seems to be less pressing. We could go through a list of hundreds and hundreds of items. One thing I think we could start with is why don't we quit sending money to countries that burn our flag? If you are a country saying: ``Death to America,'' burning the American flag, maybe we shouldn't give you any money. We give money to Pakistan, we trade and sell arms with most of the Middle East, which does not like us, and we do this with borrowed money. We don't even have the money we are sending, but we can make the burden a little less if we say: Let's not give any money to countries that hate us, to any country burning our flag. In Pakistan, there is a Christian woman by the name of Asia Bibi. She has been on death row for 5 years for being a Christian. She went to the well to draw water, and the women of the village began chanting, ``Death. Death to the Christian.'' As she was being beaten and pummeled on the ground and thought she was going to die, the police finally showed up. She thought they were there to rescue her. They were there to imprison her. They took her off to prison. That was 5 years ago. It is not easy being Christian in the Middle East. In Pakistan, there was a doctor who helped us get bin Laden. His name is Afridi. He also has been in jail now for about 5, 6 years. He helped get us information that helped us to target bin Laden and finally get this great enemy of our country. The Pakistanis put him in jail for helping us. The Pakistanis help us one day and stab us in the back the next day. When the Taliban was defeated under President Obama, when he put 100,000 troops in there, they scurried off into Pakistan, they had a sanctuary, and then they came back. I think we ought to think twice about sending money to countries that burn our flag, sending money to countries that persecute Christians, sending money to countries that, frankly, don't even like us. We spend about $30 billion helping other countries. If you were going to help your neighbor, if your neighbor was without food, would you first feed your children, and if you have a little money left over, help the children next door? That is what most people would do. If you are going to give money to your church or synagogue, would you go to the bank and borrow the money to give to somebody? Would that be compassionate or foolhardy? Is it compassionate to borrow money to give it to someone else? People here will say they have great compassion, and they want to help the people of Puerto Rico and the people of Texas and the people of Florida, but notice they have great compassion with someone else's money. Ask them if they are giving any money to Puerto Rico. Ask them if they are giving money to Texas. Ask them what they are doing to help their fellow man. You will find often it is easy to be compassionate with somebody else's money, but it is not only that. It is not only compassion with someone else's money, it is compassion with money that doesn't even exist, money that is borrowed. Of the $20 trillion we owe, China holds $1 trillion of that. All this might be said, and you might say: We just have to help people. You are worrying too much. Do you have to talk about details? Really, all the money is being well spent. If you look back at money that has been spent before on disasters, guess what--people replace everything, including things that weren't broken. I remember, in Katrina, a family who was holed up in a beachside resort for weeks with taxpayer money. They could have put them up across the street for about $60 or $50 a night. They were staying in a $400-a-night beachside resort with government money, with FEMA money. I think we have to look at how well government spends money. Do you want an example of how well government spends money? Last year, we had some great science. There was a lot of great taxpayer-funded science going on. They wanted to study whether Neil Armstrong, when he set foot on the Moon, said: ``One small step for mankind'' or whether he said: ``One small step for a man.'' So it was either ``One small step for man'' or ``One small step for a man.'' They wanted to know if the article ``a'' was in there. So they took money that was actually intended for a good purpose--to study autism--and they studied Neil Armstrong's statement when he landed on the Moon, $700,000. In the NIH last year, they spent $2 million studying whether, if someone in front of you in the buffet line sneezes on the food, are you more or less likely to eat the food that has been sneezed on? I think we could have polled the audience on that one. They spent $300,000 studying whether Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine. I think we could probably just assume yes. This kind of stuff goes on year after year. You think: Oh, those are aberrations. That is new. William Proxmire was a Senator--a conservative Democrat back in the day--and he used to do something called the Golden Fleece Award. He would put out these awards. They sound exactly the same as the stuff we are finding now. We spent money studying the gambling habits of Ugandans. We have studied how to prepare the Philippines for climate change. You name it, we are studying it around the world, with money we don't have. If you want to make the argument: We are running a surplus, we are a great country, we are going to help all the other countries of the world--I would actually listen to you if we were running a surplus, but we are not. We are running a $700 billion deficit. We borrow $1 million a minute. We have a lot of rich people here. We ought to ask these rich Senators: What have you given to Puerto Rico? What are you giving to Texas? Instead, they are giving your money. They are really not even giving your money. They are giving money they borrowed. So what am I asking? Not that we not do this. What I am asking is: Why don't we take it from something we shouldn't be doing or why don't we try to conserve? So if you decided you want to help the people next door, you might say: I am not going to the movie theater. I am not going to go to the Broadway play. I am not going to the NFL game. I am going to save money by cutting back on my expenses so I can help the people next door who are struggling, the father and mother out of work, and they need my help--but you wouldn't go to the bank and ask for a loan to help people. That is not the way it works, unless you are a government. Then common sense goes out the window, and you just spend money right and left because you are compassionate, you have a big heart, because you have the ability of the Federal Reserve just to print out more money. There are ultimately ramifications to profligate spending. We are approaching that day. Some say you get there when your debt is at 100 percent of your GDP. We have now surpassed that. We have about a $17 trillion, $18 trillion economy, and we have a $20 trillion debt. Is it getting any better? Have we planned on fixing it at all? No, there is no fixing. Is one party better than the other? No, they are equally bad. They are terrible. One side is at least honest. They don't care about the debt. The other side is just hypocrites because they say: We are going to win the election by saying we are conservative, we care about the debt, but they don't. The debt gets worse under both parties. Voters need to scratch their head and say: Maybe they are both equally bad with regard to the debt. Most of the debt is driven by this. It is driven by mandatory spending. What is mandatory spending? These are the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security. This is driving the debt. It is on autopilot. So when we talk about a budget, nobody is talking about doing anything about the spending on autopilot. Why? It is risky to talk about reforming entitlements because everybody is getting one. If we don't, though, we are consigned to more and more debt, and ultimately I think we are consigned to resign to a time in which the currency may well be destroyed and the country could be eaten from the inside out through this massive debt. Last week, we voted on a budget. From appearances, you would say: Well, the Republicans put forth a conservative budget. It had $6 trillion worth of entitlement savings. In the first year, it had $96 billion worth of entitlement savings. But ask one Republican, ask any Republican in Congress ``Where is your $96 billion worth of entitlement spending coming from?'' and most of them wouldn't even know it was in the budget. It is in the budget to make it look good and look as if it balances over 10 years. Yet there is no plan to do anything to entitlement spending. There is no plan to do any entitlement savings. There is no bill in committee and no bill to come forward. I introduced an amendment to the budget. I said: Well, if you are going to cut or save or somehow transform the entitlements into responsible spending, where we spend what comes in and we don't borrow, why don't we put rules or reconciliation instructions into the budget to tell people that, yes, we are honest, we are sincere, and we are actually going to cut spending? Do you know how many people voted for it? There are 52 Republicans; we had 5. They say they are for spending cuts, but they are not really because nobody will vote to give the instructions to actually do the spending cuts. The budget we typically vote on is called discretionary spending. This is the military and nonmilitary. If you were to eliminate all of that, you still wouldn't balance the budget. That is one-third of the budget. You can't even balance the budget by eliminating one-third of it. You have to tackle the entitlements. Yet nobody has the wherewithal, the guts, or the intestinal fortitude to actually do it. We did have a big fix once upon a time on Social Security. In 1983, President Reagan and Tip O'Neill--Republican and Democrat--came together to say that we were out of money, and we gradually raised the age of Social Security to 67. Is anybody happy to do that? Is anybody jumping up and down, saying: Oh, I want to wait longer to get Social Security. No, nobody is, but if we don't do it, there will be no Social Security because we are destroying the system. Social Security pays out more than it brings in. Once upon a time, it was the other way around. We used to have about 16 workers for every retiree. Now we have a little bit less than three workers for every retiree. Families got smaller. People ask me: Why are Social Security and Medicare running a deficit? Whose fault is it--Republicans or Democrats? Really, it is a little bit of both, but it is also the fault of your grandparents for having too many kids. A whole bunch of baby boomers were born, and they are all retiring, but the baby boomers had fewer kids, and the baby boomers' kids had even fewer kids, so it is a demographic shift. If we put our heads in the sand and do nothing, the debt will continue to accumulate. We are accumulating debt by the billions of dollars every year. This year, it is $700 billion, and it is estimated that it will be close to or may exceed $1 trillion next year. During President Obama's tenure, we had deficits of over $1 trillion in several years. Over an 8-year period, we actually increased the debt over $1 trillion a year. There was about a $10 trillion increase in the debt in the 8 years of President Obama. If we look at whose fault it is, Republicans or Democrats, it is both. But I will tell you the way it works around here. People say that it is noble, that you are enlightened if you compromise. So here is the compromise you get. You heard that four of our brave young men died in Niger the other day. Most of the people here didn't even know we were there, to the tune of 1,000 soldiers. Once they heard about it--the hawks--they said: Oh, we need more. They didn't know 1,000 were there, but they said that we need more there, that we need more people in Niger. No one has bothered to have a debate over what the war in Niger is about, whether we should be there, and whether we should send our brave, young men and women there. Our Founding Fathers said that was the first principle--the first principle of going to war. The initiation of war, the declaration of war, is to be done by Congress. They specifically took that power away from the President. It is not just about funding, although that is another way we control war, but the primary way we control whether we enter into war is the declaration of war. It is under article I, section 8. This is where the congressional powers are laid out. People say: Oh, that is an anachronism; we don't obey that anymore. They certainly don't. But it was never removed from the Constitution; they just quit and began ignoring this. How important was this to our Founding Fathers? Madison wrote this. Madison said that the executive is the branch of government most prone to war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, granted the power of war to the legislature. It wasn't just Madison who said this; it was Jefferson, Washington, Adams. The whole panoply of Founding Fathers said that war was to be initiated by Congress. We have had no vote, no debate, and most of the Members didn't know we were in this part of Africa. Yet here we are. But the knee-jerk reaction by those on the right typically, but some on the left, is that we need more, that we wouldn't have lost those 4 lives had we had 10,000 troops in a country in which none of us knew we were going to be at war. None of us fully debated who the parties are to the war. Yet we are going to be at war there now. So the knee-jerk reaction is that we are to expand our role in this war in Africa. I had my staff ask a question: How many troops do we have in Africa? Nobody here knows. We looked it up, and we found out it is 6,000. We have 6,000 troops in Africa. We knew we were at war in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya, but we didn't really know we had 6,000 troops in Africa. That would include Libya. Six thousand troops are in Africa. The point is, when you get back to the debate we are talking about-- the budget--there are a great deal of expenditures to have troops in a hundred-some-odd countries. So we literally have troops in over 100 countries. We currently have 6,000 troops in Africa. It is expensive. How do you convince the other side of the aisle to pay for it? Typically, the Republican side of the aisle says: ``Katy, bar the door.'' We will spend whatever it takes, and then some, on the military. The Democrats say: Well, what about welfare? We need more welfare. Then they tell you that to compromise is noble, to be enlightened, to be pragmatic, that to compromise is what we should shoot for, that we should work with the other side. So that is what happens. There has been a bipartisan consensus for maybe 50, 60, 70 years now, and that is to fund everything. If the right wants warfare, the left says we must get more welfare. If the left wants welfare, the right says we have to have more money for warfare. So it is guns and butter. It began in an aggressive way during the Vietnam war, but it has proceeded apace. We continue to spend money as if there is no tomorrow, but both parties are guilty. It is the right and the left. It is compromise that is killing this country. It is the compromise to spend money on everything, for everyone, whether you are from the right or the left. But there could be another form of compromise. We could say that we wish to compromise in the reverse direction. We wish to say that, look, maybe for the Republicans, national defense is more important than welfare, and maybe for the Democrats, welfare is more important than warfare, but maybe the compromise could be, you know what, we don't have enough money for either one. Maybe the compromise could be that we will spend a little bit less on each. You know what. We did that recently. When I first came up here, I was elected in this tea party tidal wave that was concerned about debt. Something called a sequester was passed. Guess who hated it. All the big-spending Republicans and all the big-spending Democrats. They couldn't pass out their goodies and favors enough because there was some restraint. You say: Well, I heard the sequester was terrible. I saw people at school and I saw people in my town saying that the sequester wasn't giving them enough money. The sequester was actually a slowdown in the rate of growth of spending. This is why you have to understand newspeak. We talk about newspeak and how people change the meaning of words to make them meaningless or even to make them mean the opposite. You hear all the time--when we were having the debate on repealing ObamaCare, we were talking about capping the rate of growth of Medicaid. You heard all the squawking on the left saying we were going to cut Medicaid. No. We were going to cut the rate of growth of Medicaid. So we had a sequester, and it was evenly divided between military and nonmilitary, between Republican interests and Democratic interests. It did not cut; it slowed down the rate of growth of spending over 10 years. It was actually working to a certain degree. We got it because people who were concerned about the debt fought and fought and said: We need to be concerned about the debt. We are hollowing out the country from the inside out. Who destroyed the sequester? Really, the voices were louder on the Republican side than the Democratic side, but both parties were complicit. The sequester has essentially been gutted and destroyed, and the spending caps have become somewhat meaningless. We have before us today $36 billion. It will exceed the spending caps. We have a sequester in place, but there are all these exemptions, so it is exempt. Anytime you say it is an emergency, it is an exemption. Within the $36 billion, though, there is $16 billion because we run a terrible government-run flood program that is $16 billion in the hole. So we are going to bail it out by letting it wipe out all of its debt. That sounds like long-term mismanagement in a badly run program rather than an emergency. Yet it is going to be stuck in an emergency bill so it can exceed the caps. What am I asking for today? I am asking that we obey our own rules. We set these rules. We set these spending caps. We set the sequester. Let's obey them. The other side will say: Oh, we are obeying the rules; we are just not counting this money. That is the problem. We have this dishonest accounting where people say: Oh yeah, we are obeying the rules. But we are not. There are a couple of ways you could pay for this. The first way, I tried a couple of weeks ago. We had a $15 billion bill, and I said: Why don't we pay for it with the foreign aid, the welfare we give to other countries? Why don't we say: You know what, it is time we looked at America first. It is time that we took care of our own. It is time that we spend money taking care of those in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, but let's spend money that we were going to send in the form of welfare to other countries. Maybe we should take care of our own. Instead, though, the Senate voted otherwise. I forced the issue. They weren't too happy with the amendment. I only got the vote because I was persistent and I threatened to delay things, and I was able to get a vote. Do you know how many Senators voted for this? No Democrats. No Democrats wanted to offset any spending, and 10 Republicans did. I think the vote was 87 to 10. Eighty-seven Senators voted to keep spending money without any offsets, to basically just borrow the money. Now we are having the same debate again. I have an amendment to offset the $36 billion. In all likelihood, I am not going to get an amendment vote because they don't have time. It would take 15 minutes, and God forbid we spend 15 minutes talking about how we are being eaten alive by a $20 trillion debt. God forbid we talk about how a $20 trillion debt is an anchor around the neck of the country. God forbid. God forbid we offer an amendment and at least take 15 minutes to have an offset, to say we should pay for this money we are going to send to Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida, pay for it by taking it from some other element in the budget. Last time, I offered foreign welfare. This time, what I put on the table is something that is very similar to a bill that has been put forward and offered for several years called the Penny Plan. The Penny Plan is this. There is a great illustration of this--if you want to look at this on YouTube--of a guy with a bunch of pennies stacked and showing sort of in a visual way what it would be like to cut one penny out of every dollar. That is what we are talking about. A 1-percent cut across the board would pay for this $36 billion bill. It is actually a little bit less than 1 percent. One percent of a $4 trillion budget would be $40 billion. We need $36 billion, so it is less than 1 percent. Just cut the budget less than 1 percent. Do you think there might be 1 percent waste in every department, including even departments of government you might like? Do you think any American families ever had to deal with a 1-percent cut? Government is so wasteful at every level that we could probably cut several percentage points of every division and department of government, and you wouldn't know it was gone. I mean, the waste is astounding. When we looked at where money is spent, we looked at some of the money that was being shipped overseas not too long ago, and one of the programs that we found was a televised cricket league for Afghanistan. All right, self-esteem is really important, and you are going to pay for it. So we are going to pay for television so that the Afghans can feel better about themselves by watching cricket on TV. The first problem is that we don't have the money. We have to borrow it. The second problem is that they don't have televisions in Afghanistan. Well, some do, but the 1 in 1,000 people who have a television, I guess, are going to feel better about the Americans paying so that they can watch cricket on TV. It is one thing after another. We paid $1 million for a variety program to put little songs and skits on their televisions. Once again, most of them do not have a TV to watch. In the war effort in Afghanistan, we spent trillions and trillions of dollars on the war effort. We have defeated the Taliban many times, and I am sure that we could defeat them again, but that just means that they will go across the border, hide in caves, and go back when we are tired. We spent $45 million on a gas station in Afghanistan. This is an interesting gas station. It serves up natural gas. You might say that is great because we are lessening the carbon footprint in Afghanistan, except that it is completely absurd. They do not have any cars that run on natural gas in Afghanistan. So they built a $45 million plant. The original estimate was that it was going to cost about $500,000. It was like 46 times the cost of overruns, and it ended up costing $45 million. It serves up natural gas, but nobody has a car that runs on natural gas. We said whoops, and we immediately bought them 24 cars that run on natural gas so they could go to the $45 million gas station to get their natural gas. But that was not enough. We had natural gas cars for them, but they had no money with which to buy the natural gas. So we bought them all credit cards. We bought them natural-gas-burning cars, we gave them a natural-gas gas station, and we bought them credit cards to reduce the carbon footprint of those who are living in Afghanistan. This is absurd. When we look at the budget and when we look at accounting, a lot of the money that has been spent overseas in the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the Syria war, the Niger war, the Libya war, the Somalia war, and the Chad war is not really budgeted. A lot of this money is actually done as an off-budget thing. It is called the overseas contingency operations. It is really a way of cheating, a way of being dishonest in your accounting. It is a way of evading spending caps, but it has also gone a long way toward making it easier to keep spending money without restraint. We tried to put restraints on military and nonmilitary, and they were exceeded by this slush fund. They call it OCO funding, or overseas contingency operations. When we had the budget vote recently, I put forward an amendment and simply said that we should not spend above our caps. If we put these caps in place, this is what we should spend. I think that we got maybe 15 or 20 votes on that, but this is the problem. Ultimately, we have to decide as a country this: Are we going to obey the Constitution? Are we going to go to war only when we declare war, when Congress does its job and declares war, or are we going to go to war anytime, anywhere? That is sort of what we do now. We go to war anytime, anywhere on the face of the planet, and it is not for free. Not only is it expensive in dollars, but it is expensive in the lives of the young men and women who are sent to these wars. Yet no one has ever voted on them. We lost a soldier in Yemen 3 or 4 months ago. For his family, it was devastating, but America pays little attention because America is, basically, not fighting the war. A very small percentage of America--brave young men and women who are often from rural parts of our country--is fighting our wars, but the mass of America is not fighting. You could say that they are volunteers--that is great, and I think that is the best kind of army to have--but I hate it that we do not show the responsibility and care of actually doing our job and of taking the time to debate it. Should we be at war in Yemen or not? Should we be at war in Niger? Should we be at war in Libya? Should we be at war in Chad? Should we be at war in Somalia, in Djibouti, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan? We have troops in probably 20 or 30 nations in which there is conflict going on, and we are actively involved in the midst of conflict in at least 6 or 7. It is very expensive in human lives and dollars. We need to ask ourselves this: Will we do this forever? The Sunnis have been fighting the Shia for about 1,000 years. People say: Well, we are going after ISIS in Africa. ISIS is basically a name for radical jihadist Islam, and it is all over the planet. Are we going to go everywhere and kill every one of them? Is there a possibility that, when we kill 1 that 10 more will pop up? Is the Whac-A-Mole strategy for killing every terrorist on the planet or every radical on the planet the way that we are going to win? We went into Yemen on a manned raid in January or February of this year, and we lost one brave Navy SEAL. They say that we got information, but they will not exactly tell me what information they got. They claim that it was this great information that is going to make the war on terror so much easier. I have my doubts. In the raid, though, which was a manned raid in the middle of Yemen, women and children died. I do not blame our soldiers. I have members of my family who are Active Duty. They do what they are told. They take orders. It is tough being put in a situation like that. You are dropped in the middle of nowhere in a village. Maybe the women and children are shooting at you as well. You have to defend yourself and complete your mission. Yet I wonder whether or not the policymakers should be more involved with making the decision as to whether we should be in Yemen and whether or not the people who live in the surrounding area to that village will, for 100 years or more, recite through oral tradition the day that the Americans came, and whether or not we will have actually killed more terrorists than will have been created by the oral tradition of when the Americans came. We are also aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia in this horrific war in Yemen. There are 17 million people who live on the edge of starvation in Yemen, and the war is exacerbating that. Yemen is a very poor country to begin with. They import about 80 percent of their food. Currently, the Saudis have a blockade. So no food is getting in. They say that it is to prevent arms, and I am sure it is, but one of the consequences is no food. There are a half million people with cholera right now. It is sort of a bad form of dysentery, and in poor countries, you die from cholera. There are a half million people with cholera. It goes along with no food and no clean water. The Saudis are blockading Yemen, and the Saudis are bombing Yemen. We are selling the Saudis the weapons. We are refueling the planes and helping the Saudis pick the targets. One of the Saudi targets about 1 year ago was a funeral procession. This was a funeral procession of a Houthi leader or rebel. There were 500 people--civilians--who were wounded in that procession, and there were 150 who were killed by a Saudi bomb on civilians. Do you think they are going to soon forget that? Do you think that by killing 150 people in a funeral procession and wounding 500, you killed more terrorists that day than you created? I would say that that day will live on in oral history for 1,000 years. The day the Saudis came with American bombs and bombed an unarmed funeral procession will live on for 1,000 years, and hundreds-- if not thousands--of people will be motivated to become suicide bombers because of the day that the Saudis bombed a funeral procession. It is incredibly expensive in lives--their lives, our lives. When you look at the cause of famine around the globe and when you look at it extensively and study the causes of famine, it is war probably 6 or 7 times out of 10. War is a terrible thing, and we must acknowledge that and try to think of ways that we can make war the last resort instead of the first resort. I mean, for goodness sake, the people on television this Sunday did not know how many troops were in Niger. Yet their immediate response was that we should have had more--that we need more troops over there in Africa--in a place that most Americans have not heard of and have no idea who is fighting whom or whether or not it is an achievable goal. They say that 1,000 was not enough, that if we had had 10,000 in air support and all of this, we would have prevented these deaths. That is one lesson you could learn. The other lesson you could learn is that maybe we should not have been there at all. You see, people have to stand up for themselves. There is this idea of sort of self-rule and independence, but if people are coddled and not sort of forced into the position of defending themselves, they will not. We have been in Afghanistan for 16 years. In the 16 years we have been there, what have we found? We have found that about 60,000 to 80,000 Afghans have come over here. We have to help these translators. Well, they speak English, and they are pro-West. So they need to stay in Afghanistan and create a country. The best people left. It is the same in Iraq. We won the war in Iraq, and all of the good people came over here. I have nothing personally against those who came other than that I am disappointed that there were not enough people who were heroic enough to stay in their country to help build a new country. Who fights over there? Some of the Afghans fight. Some people join their army to shoot us. We have this green on green, where their soldiers are shooting our soldiers because they come in and intentionally are there to kill our soldiers. Yet the question is, How come, after 15, 16 years, the Afghans cannot fight to preserve their nation? Now everybody says: Oh, if America comes home, the Taliban will take over. The Taliban is not quite ISIS. It is also not quite the same international sort of jihadist. They did harbor bin Laden once upon a time. Most of those people are dead if not all of them. If you look at how terrorism ended when the IRA ended in England and in Ireland, it ended up being a negotiation. So many say that they will never negotiate with the enemy. If you never negotiate with the Taliban--they are, unfortunately, pretty popular in Afghanistan, and they are going to be there forever--can we kill them all? No. It is just like the radicals throughout these Islamic countries. I think there are too many to kill. The question is, Do you create more than you kill? If you put this in context and say that we have to be able to defend ourselves and that our country needs to be strong to defend itself, I could not agree more, but do you know what? We become weaker every day as we run up this debt. We are $20 trillion in debt--$700 billion this year. We borrow $1 million a minute. Realize that predicament, and then realize that the powers that be do not want to allow amendments to offset spending. I am proposing, if we spend money on Puerto Rico and Texas and Florida, that we offset it by taking it from something that is less of a priority, from something else in the budget. If we were to cut 1 percent of the rest of the budget, we would have more than enough to pay for this. Would anybody notice 1 percent? Sure. One would have to push things around a little bit, but they would all survive. We have looked at spending, and to show you how bad spending in the Federal Government is, it gets faster each month as you get toward the end of the year. When there is only 1 month left, these bureaucrats say: Oh, my goodness, we might not be able to spend the money fast enough. So spending in the last month of the year is, actually, five times faster than in any other month of the year. In fact, in the last month of the fiscal year, not only is it five times faster, but each progressive day it gets faster. The last month of the fiscal year is September. On September 1, they spend the money like this. On September 2, it is like this. On September 3, it like this. On September 4, it is like this. It goes up every day because they are trying to shovel the money out as fast as they can. If they do not spend it all, they are afraid they will not get it next year. The common parlance is ``use it or lose it.'' When you get all the way to the last day of the fiscal year, spending actually increases and goes with the rising and setting Sun. So it is 8 o'clock, earlier here than it is in California. As the Sun rises, we begin spending money in the East. We are shoveling it out as fast as we can. As the Sun progresses towards sunset, the spending shifts to the west coast. They are shoveling it out at 5 o'clock Pacific time in their trying to get rid of the money. If you look at when most conferences are, when most government employees go to a conference in Las Vegas, it is in the last months of the year. They found that they have some money. What is a million bucks? You don't mind spending a million bucks, right? You want these government employees to have a good time. So there was a group--I think it was the General Services Administration--a couple of years ago, and you saw those pictures of the head of the GSA and his wife in a big Las Vegas hot tub, drinking champagne. I think that was a million-dollar event--it was either at that conference or at another one--in which they decided that it would be good and instructive for their employees if they actually had a Star Trek reenactment. So they hired Star Trek reenactors. With that, I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, this amendment is about whether or not we are serious about the debt. In the current budget, there are instructions to reduce the debt by $96 billion in mandatory spending. I applaud that, but we need budget reconciliation instructions to allow it to happen. This amendment will allow instructions so we can really do what we say we are going to do, which is to cut spending. I think, in light of the fact that we are for tax cuts, we ought to also be for reducing spending so we don't explode the debt. I recommend a ``yes'' vote on reconciliation instructions to allow for mandatory savings and spending.

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, this amendment is about the debt. We have a $20 trillion debt. It is about whether we are serious about tackling that debt. The budget before us exceeds our own spending caps by $43 billion. You will be told that technically that is not so because we hide the money by sticking it in an account we call the Overseas Contingency Operations. Over the past 3 years, we have spent more than $1.7 trillion in this account, but we don't account for it, and we don't budget for it. What I am asking us to do is to be responsible, budget for this, stay within our self-imposed caps, and actually act as though we really believe in what we say--that the debt is a problem.

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, across the country, Republicans promised to repeal ObamaCare. They promised to repeal all of ObamaCare, root and branch. Not one Republican promised to keep and block grant ObamaCare. They promised to repeal ObamaCare. Tonight I present another chance. My amendment will provide budget reconciliation instructions so Republican Senators can fulfill their promise; so they can actually repeal ObamaCare, root and branch, as they promised.

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

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, rather than bicker over raising taxes on some people and lowering taxes on other people, we should cut everyone's taxes to make sure we get a middle-class tax cut across the board. The best way to do that is to give the tax committee a mandate that is larger, a mandate for a bigger tax cut. My amendment provides budget reconciliation instructions to increase the tax cut to $2.5 trillion. If we were to believe this budget, it claims to save over $6 trillion over 10 years--more than enough to go bigger, better, and bolder on cutting taxes.

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

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, for the first time in 15 years, we are debating the congressional role in the declaration of war. We have fought the longest war in U.S. history under an original authorization to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11. That war is long since over, the war has long since lost its purpose, and it is long past time that we have a debate in Congress about whether we should be at war. It is the constitutional role of Congress. Interestingly, the folks you have heard on either side of the issue have said it is our job. It is what we should be doing. Yet we haven't done it for 16 years. Who in their right mind thinks that Congress is actually going to do their job without being forced to do their job? My resolution is actually silent on whether we should still be at war. My resolution simply says that the resolutions we have previously passed will expire. I don't believe they have anything to do with the seven wars we are involved with currently, anyway, but if we were to force them to expire, we would then have a debate. But for those who say: Yes, Congress should exert its authority; Congress should be involved in the initiation of war--they don't really believe that unless they are going to vote that way. What will happen is the continuation of the same--that we abdicate that role and let the President do whatever he wants. It is worse than that. Let's say that we were to vote for my resolution and that the authorization to go to war after 9/11 expired. Do you think any of the wars would end? No. The neoconservatives and the neoliberals believe the President has unlimited authority. They call it article II authority for war. There is some authority given to the President--an enormous amount of authority--to execute the war but not to initiate the war. The sole duty of initiation of war was given specifically to Congress. So if these authorities were to expire--the President already says: I have all the authority I want under the Constitution to do whatever I want. But that is not what our Founders wanted. Madison, if he were here, would vehemently disagree. Madison wrote that the executive branch is the branch most prone for war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the legislature. It was supposed to be difficult to go to war. Some wrung their hands and said: Oh, the Senate can never agree on any authorization to go to war. How long did it take us after Pearl Harbor? Twenty-four hours, and we declared war on Japan. How long did it take us after 9/11? It took 3 days. We can come together as a body when we are attacked, when we are unified in purpose. But guess what--after 16 years, it is difficult to determine the purpose in Afghanistan. Also, those who say: We need a new authorization, but it is going to authorize war anywhere, anytime, with no geographic limit and no time limit--basically they would be authorizing everything we are doing now and not putting any limitations on it. We are in Yemen. We are aiding and abetting the Saudi war in Yemen. Yet there has been no vote on it. Seventeen million people live on the edge of starvation because of the Saudi blockade and bombing campaign. We are aiding and abetting that. Yet there has been no vote here in Congress. Look, we have problems here at home. These wars are costing trillions of dollars. They are unauthorized. We have not voted on them. And I say, look, let's pay attention to some of the problems we have here at home. We are going to have a $150 billion tab for the Hurricane Harvey damage in Texas. Yet we continue with unauthorized, unconstitutional, undeclared war. I think it is time to think about the problems we have here at home. I think it is time to think about the $20 trillion debt we have. But we still have this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, saying: What if Congress doesn't do its job? What if we allowed this authorization of force to expire and we didn't get another one? The thing is, that is abdicating your constitutional duty. The duty is to do what is within your constitutional duty. It is not to say: Well, the other Congressmen won't do their job, so I am not going to do my job. Our job is to enforce, obey, and execute the Constitution. The Constitution says Congress shall declare war. It doesn't say the President can go to war anytime, anywhere around the globe. It says Congress shall declare war. So for the first time in 15 years, we are debating whether Congress has a role in this. Those who vote no against my resolution are basically voting--even though they will say otherwise, they are voting to say: Well, let's just let the status quo go on. The President can do what he wants. It is too emotional, it is too controversial to debate war. So we will keep letting the President do whatever he wants. My vote is to grab power back. My vote is to say: The Senate has prerogative here. The Constitution gives the power to the legislature. That is what this vote is about. It is about grabbing back the power to declare war and saying this is a Senate prerogative. So the majority, in all likelihood, will say: No, we do not want to do that. We think that would risk some war somewhere, sometime. That is the point. We should be debating where we should be at war. Should we be at war in Somalia? Should we be at war in Libya? Should we be at war in Yemen? Should we be at war in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan? Look, President Obama ran on ending the wars; yet he ended up taking the war and bombing campaign to seven countries without his having any authorization. Intriguingly, the left was relentless in criticizing George Bush; yet George Bush did come to Congress. We had a vote to go after those who attacked us on 9/11. We had an ill-fought campaign with regard to the Iraq war, but we did actually vote on it. We have not voted for a generation. Should one generation be able to bind another generation? Realize that, if we do not force these authorizations to expire, this war could go on forever. This is 1984. This is George Orwell's saying that Oceania has always been at war with East Asia and then, a month later, his saying that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia-- because no one is stepping up to say no. That is what Congress is supposed to do. We are supposed to be a voice that debates and asks: Should we go to war? It is part of doing our job, but the only way to get Congress to do its job is to actually let these expire. We should have a full-throated debate over who initiates war. There is no murkiness to the Constitution. The Constitution is explicit. The power of the initiation of war--the declaration of war--lies with Congress, but the war in Afghanistan has gone on for 16 years now. Our young men and women who will be fighting in the war in the next year or so were not yet born on 9/11. We have long since killed the people who perpetrated 9/11. With the killing of bin Laden, there is no person left in the leadership of al-Qaida or the Taliban who was around at that period of time. Yet we say: Well, it is still the Taliban. If you are going to say that we are going to fight until the end of time--that we are going to have a perpetual war until the end of time--and that we are going to kill every radical Islamist in the world, it is an impossibility. I would say, at the very least, let's have a debate. If that is your purpose, if that is your goal, and if that is what you stand for, step forward, and let's have a debate. Let's debate the war in Yemen. Let's debate the war in Somalia. Let's debate whether we should be bombing people in Nigeria. Let's debate whether we should be in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. Let's have a debate about all of these different wars. Let's not just muddle on and say: Oh, the President can do what he wants. Realize that the people in this body who are for perpetual war do not even think we should have any role in it. They tell me quietly every day that the President can do whatever he wants under article II of the Constitution. That is absolutely false. Read the Federalist Papers. There is extensive debate over the war-making power. From Washington, to Adams, to Jefferson, to Madison, they all said very explicitly: We give this power to Congress because we fear the perpetual wars that we have seen in Europe. We fear the wars of brother fighting brother and brother fighting cousin within these royal disputes that went on endlessly in Europe. He set up our founding document to try to make war difficult, but when we have been attacked, it has been easy to come together. For 9/11, virtually unanimously, we came together within 3 days. For Pearl Harbor, it was within 24 hours. What I would say to my colleagues is: Do your job. This is your constitutional role. Let's let these expire, and over the next 6 months, let's debate whether we should be at war and where. I, for one, am one who says that we should oppose unauthorized, undeclared, unconstitutional war. At this particular time, there are no limits on war. The 9/11 proclamation has been interpreted so widely that it could mean anything. You have people who interpret it widely, but you also have people who say that the Constitution says that the President can do anything. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended. I am proud to be a part of and an instigator of the debate. For the first time in 15 years, the full Senate will vote on whether we have a role in initiating war, whether we should continue to be at war, or whether we should even vote on whether we should continue to be at war. I urge the Senate to adopt my amendment, which would be a 6-month moratorium--a 6-month sunset--on the 2001 and 2002 resolution so that we could then have the real debate. But mark my words: Those who will come out and say that they are for the real debate are not really for it unless they are willing to sunset it, because we have been going for 16 years without having a real debate. There will be no real debate on war unless we pass this resolution. I yield back my time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I rise today to oppose unauthorized, undeclared, and unconstitutional war. What we have today is basically unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, anyplace upon the globe. My amendment would sunset in 6 months the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of force. What does that mean? This was legislation passed many years ago to go after the people who attacked us on 9/11. I supported that battle, but I think the mission is long since over. I don't think anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty believes these authorizations from 16 years ago and 14 years ago--I don't think anyone with intellectual honesty believes they authorized war in seven different countries. Not only is it lives we are losing, the American soldiers, the brave young men and women who are sent to distant lands and asked to give their lives for their country without the Senate taking the time to authorize the war--I think that is terribly unjust and should end. There are some who argue that we don't even need to vote at all. Some of the Presidents, Republican and Democratic, have said they have article II--this is the second article of the Constitution--they say that by the Constitution, they can do what they want, when they want, where they want, and that Congress never has to approve their authorization and never has to give authority to go to war. These advocates of perpetual war argue that these powers are implicit and that no one can stop a President who wants to go to war. This is diametrically opposite of what our Founding Fathers thought. Madison in particular disagreed. Madison wrote that the executive branch is the branch most prone to go to war; therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the Congress. Our Founding Fathers saw the history of Europe as the perpetual history of war--brothers fighting brothers, Kings of two different countries who were cousins, brothers, uncles, fathers, sons. The history of Europe was perpetual war. When we broke away, we said: We are going to have some checks and balances in place. We are going to make it difficult to go to war. We are going to vest that power in the Congress. But somewhere along the way, we lost our way, and we now commit ourselves to war or one man or one woman commits us to war without any vote by Congress. This is not what our Founding Fathers intended. Former President Obama, when he was a candidate, wrote that no President should unilaterally go to war unless we were under imminent attack. That is the understanding of the Constitution that most originalists take. Yet, once Mr. Obama was in the White House, he bombed seven different countries. He expanded the use of Executive power. He expanded the war-making power of the Presidency, even while all along saying that he was for a narrower interpretation. Candidate Trump said that the war in Afghanistan had lost its purpose, that it was a disaster, and that it should end. He said that on maybe 15 different occasions. Yet, now that he is in the White House, the generals have said: We must fight on. We must continue to fight. If we leave, the Taliban will take over. My question is, When will the Afghans stand up and fight? We have spent $1 trillion helping them. We spent billions of dollars trying to convince them not to grow the poppy that becomes the opium that addicts the world. Yet last year Afghanistan had the biggest crop of poppy they have ever had in recent history. The people who run Afghanistan, whom we put in to govern, the Karzai family--full of drug dealers, crooks, and thieves. You wonder why they are not popular in their own country. But my question is, Where did the $1 trillion go? Why can't they defend themselves? Why do we have to fight their wars for them? One thing is certain: The war was not authorized by you, the people, and the war was not authorized by us, the Congress, and therefore the war is unconstitutional. The war is unauthorized. You say: Well, do we ever get it right? Have we ever voted to authorize war? Yes, we have. When we went to war in Afghanistan the first time--and I would have voted yes--there was a vote, and overwhelmingly we voted to go in. Some have argued: Well, is 6 months enough time for Congress to do anything? Can they get anything done in 6 months? When we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, do you know how long it took us to declare war? Twenty-four hours. When we were attacked on 9/11, how long did it take us to authorize the military force to go in? Three days. People say Congress will never get it done. Maybe it is because we are divided. We haven't been attacked, we have no clear purpose in Afghanistan, and there is no clear route to victory. Realize that in 2011 President Obama put 100,000 troops into Afghanistan. Sure, he pushed the Taliban back. Where did they go? To our ally Pakistan, which has gotten billions and billions of dollars of American welfare and as we sit here is destined to get another half a million of your money in American welfare over the next month. Billions and billions of dollars we send to Pakistan, but where does the Taliban live? In Pakistan. They run back and forth across the border. So we have to ask the question, What is our purpose? Are we nation building? We spend hundreds of billions of dollars building their roads, building their bridges, building their schools. They bomb them, we bomb them--somebody bombs them, and then we rebuild them again. We have $150 billion worth of damage in Texas. Do you know how we should pay for it? Let's quit sending welfare to foreign countries. Let's look at our country first, the problems we have here, rebuild our roads, our bridges, our schools, and not borrow it, not add to a $20 trillion debt. Take the money we are sending in welfare to foreign countries and let's rebuild our own. We are at war in seven countries--none of them voted on by Congress. Is it expensive? Yes, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Today we will debate the issue of war and whether Congress is constitutionally bound to declare war. We will debate whether one generation can bind another generation to perpetual war. We are at the point where we have been in Afghanistan so long that within the next year, there will be people fighting who were not yet born on 9/11. This war no longer has anything to do with 9/11, no longer has anything to do with any vital interest in our country. It has to do with us believing we could reshape the world and make the world safe for democracy--everyone is going to love America, and everyone is going to become a western style democracy. Guess what? It is never going to happen. Afghanistan is not even a real country; it is a collection of five or six tribal lands that were stuck together by Europeans who had no knowledge of the local people. They don't even like each other, much less us. Do you know what they call the President, who resides in Kabul? They call him the mayor of Kabul derisively because he has no sway over them. They are interested in who their chieftain is in their local area. They speak five different languages. They are never going to be a country. If you want to be at war there, you want to send your sons and daughters to Afghanistan, you think somehow it will make our country safer, let's vote on it. So what I am advocating is a vote. For the first time in 16 years, I am advocating that we should vote on whether we should be at war. It should be a simple vote, but it is like pulling teeth. I have been trying very hard to get this vote for 5 years now. I am this close. I am hoping to get the vote today or tomorrow, but it isn't easy because we have been obstructing and obstructing, and no one wants to be on the line. Yet that is why we are elected--to put our names, our John Hancock, on the line. Are you for the war or against the war? I am done. I am done. I am ready to come home. I remember my father saying, in 2008, in one of the Presidential debates, when they asked ``How will you get the people home?'' he said ``We just marched in, and we can just march out.'' There is no more meaning or purpose in Afghanistan. We had 100,000 troops there in 2011. All of the Taliban scurried into Pakistan, and as soon as the troops diminished, they went back. Some people take from that lesson--they say: We need 200,000 or we need half a million troops or we need to stay there forever and police every corner for them. I take it to mean that the governments themselves over there do not have the popular support of the people. Stand up and fight for your country. Half of the people in Afghanistan who were helping us over there came to our country. They fled. It is the same with Iraq. All of the good people in Iraq--our translators, pro-Western people--came to our country. I understand wanting to come to a good place, but it would be like having the people who signed the Declaration of Independence, after they had fought the war and America had won, going back to England and saying: Oh, it is dangerous in the new country. Yet that is what we have been saying year after year, so the people who have pro-Western values from Afghanistan now live in the United States and the same in Iraq. The thing is that we need to have some tough love. They need to practice some responsibility, and they need to take ownership of their country. But as long as you coddle people, as long as you give people stuff, and as long as you fight their wars for them, they are not going to step up and fight. We are going to debate whether Afghanistan is a winnable war. We will also debate whether war in Yemen is in our national interest. Most of America does not know that we are at war in Yemen. Most of America does not know where Yemen is. We need to know why we are there and whether it is of any value to the United States. We will debate whether our support for Saudi Arabia is exacerbating starvation and the plague of cholera in Yemen. We will debate whether it is in our national interest to topple the Government of Syria. There are 2 million Christians who live in Syria. Guess what. We may not understand it, but most of those Christians support Assad. On the side of the war that we have been funding and arming with the radical Islamists from Saudi Arabia and with the radical Islamists from Qatar are the people who hate the Christians. We are fighting on the side of the people who hate the Christians in Syria. Does that make Assad a good guy? No, but the thing is that maybe sometimes there is no good person in a war, no good side to a war. For 5 years, I have been fighting to have a vote on whether we should be at war and where. I think there is no greater responsibility for a legislator than to vote on when we go to war. I tell the young soldiers whom I meet that it is my responsibility to discuss, debate, and think seriously about whether we send them to war. One of the things that is most mistaken by politicians--even by some who are well intended--is that they think every soldier in America is jumping up and down to go to his eighth tour in Afghanistan. Go out and meet the soldiers. They are not allowed to be politically active, and they are not a political force on Washington, but I guarantee that if you were to ask our soldiers ``Are you ready to go back for your eighth tour of Afghanistan? Do you see purpose in Afghanistan?'' that they have lost sight of what that purpose is. I met a Navy SEAL about a year ago. He had been in for 19 years--a tough guy, as they all are--and he said to me: Do you know what? We can defeat any enemy. We can kill any enemy. We can succeed at almost any mission that you give us. But the mistake is when you--Congress or a President--tell us to go somewhere and plant the flag and create a country. We are just not very good at nation building. We have the world's most elite military. We can defend our country. We can defend, without question, against all invaders. Yet we are not very good at making countries out of places that are not. What we should think about is that we have a $20 trillion debt. We borrow $1 million a minute. Even if you thought it was a good idea to try to create a country in Iraq or create a country in Afghanistan or create some sort of paradise in Yemen or Somalia or Nigeria or Libya or any of the places we are--even if you thought some paradise was a great thing--we have no money with which to do it. We are destroying our country from within. We are eating out the substance of the very greatness of America by borrowing $1 million a minute. We are flat broke. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Sam. We cannot afford to be everybody's Uncle Patsy. We cannot afford to keep exporting our money and our jobs to the rest of the world. We need to look at our country and say it is time that we did things for our country, for our people, and it is time that we quit borrowing $1 million a minute. The question is, Will the Senators--will those who gather to vote-- stand for the rule of law? Will the Senators stand for congressional authority for war? Will they stand for what the Constitution clearly says in article I, section 8, which is that Congress, not the President, shall declare war? Will the Senators sit idly by and let the wars continue unabated and unauthorized? Some will argue that sunsetting the old authorizations is too soon, too dramatic. Really? So 6 months and 16 years later, we have not decided whether we should be at war or where we should be, and we cannot decide in 6 months? It took us 24 hours to decide with Pearl Harbor. It took us 3 days to decide with 9/11. I think 6 months is more than enough time. Will Congress do its job unless it is forced to? All history says no. Why does Congress have an 11-percent approval rating from the people? Because it is not doing its job. How do we force Congress to do its job? Give it deadlines. How can we get a deadline? Let's pass this. Let's let the authorizations expire. Let's have a full-throated, deep, and heartfelt debate over whether we should be at war and where. Should we be at war in Afghanistan? Is there a winnable and foreseeable winnable future there? Should we be at war in Iraq? Syria? Yemen? Libya? Today's vote can be seen as a proxy vote for the Constitution. Today's vote is not really a vote for or against any particular war. Today's vote is simply a vote on whether we will obey the Constitution. Today's vote is a vote on whether Congress will step up and do its job. Sixteen-and-a-half years is more than enough time to determine whether the war in Afghanistan or Yemen or Libya or Somalia has purpose or real meaning for our national security. Often, it is said--very glibly--that, yes, it is in our national security interest. Realize when people tell you that they are giving you a conclusion. That is the beginning of the debate. We could debate for hours and hours. Hopefully, we will have some of that debate, but we have to debate what is in our vital national interest. Just to say it is so does not make it so. Does anybody in America think the war in Yemen is in our vital interest? Most people do not know where Yemen is, much less think it is in our vital interest. Guess what. The war in Yemen may actually be opposed to our vital national interest. It may be making it worse. The war in Libya certainly did. President Obama, when he chose to act illegally and intervene in Libya, made the world less safe. It was not his intention. I will grant him that his motives were to make it more safe, but he made the world less safe. Why? Because when Qadhafi was toppled, you got chaos. You have two competing governments in Libya, and you have chaos. If you want to set up a terrorist camp, if you are ready to go find a good place in the world, Libya is one of the prime places to go now because the government is gone and there is chaos. So I would argue that the intervention--one of the wars that we fought illegally, without the approval of the Senate, under the unilateral action of the President-- made us less safe. That is why we are supposed to debate before we go to war. We are less safe because of the Libyan war. How about the Syrian war? It is the Christians on one side and us on the other side. That is the first problem I have. The people on the side of the war that we supported are the radical Islamists. ISIS was on the side that we were supporting. In fact, one of the most famous, if not the most famous and important leaked email about Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks was when Hillary Clinton sent an email to John Podesta, writing to him: Hmm, we need to exert some influence on Saudi Arabia and Qatar because they are giving financial and strategic assistance to ISIS. Realize that. Of the people we are selling weapons to in Saudi Arabia and Qatar--they get all of their weapons from us--guess who they are giving them to. ISIS. They were on the same side as ISIS. Let's say you do not believe that. You say: Oh, I don't believe that. Certainly we would not have done that because we would not have supported the bad people. Let's say we just supported the so-called moderates. They are still fighting against the guys who are protecting the Christians. What was the net effect of the Syrian civil war? Before we got involved, Assad was winning the war. Once again, like Qadhafi, he is not a great guy, but he does defend the Christians, and the Christians do support him. We turned the tide of the war by flowing in hundreds and hundreds of tons of weapons in 2013--us, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia-- but these weapons went in indiscriminantly. What happened when we turned the tide of the war? Chaos in a vacuum. In that vacuum, guess who arose. ISIS. When you created chaos in Libya by fighting an unconstitutional, unauthorized war, you got more terrorism, more chaos, and the world was a less safe place. When we got involved in Syria without the authorization of Congress-- unconstitutional, unauthorized--what did you get? Chaos and the rise of ISIS. What do we have in Yemen right now? In Yemen, you have a Sunni-backed government in exile that is supported by the Saudis, and you have these Houthi rebels who are supported by Iran. But that is not all you have in Yemen. You also have al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula--three different groups. It is said that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula is actually the strongest remaining presence of al-Qaida. Is it possible, in our supporting the Saudi Arabian-backed government against the Houthis, that they fight and kill each other to such a degree of chaos that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula fills the vacuum? If you look at Libya, that is what happened. If you look at Syria, that is what happened. What if it happens in Yemen? You have to ask, what is our vital interest in Yemen? Why are we in Yemen? Why are we supplying bombs to the Saudis? Is it somehow making us safer from terrorism? Are we killing them over there so they do not kill us over here? Guess what. We may be creating more terrorists than we can possibly kill. The Saudis bombed a funeral procession of civilians. They killed 150 people, and they wounded 500. Do you think they are ever going to forget about it? That is going to be passed down through oral tradition for a thousand years, and they will talk about the day that the Saudis came and bombed civilians. They will also say in the next breath: Guess who gave them the bombs. The Americans. Guess who helped to guide the planes. Guess who refueled the planes in the air. The Americans refueled the Saudis the day that they came to bomb a funeral procession. So, in the end, we killed 150 people. You might say: Well, they were all bad people. They were at the funeral of a bad person. Do you think that we killed 150 and that will be the end of it, or do you think that those who were wounded, who survived and went back to their villages, told every one of their neighbors and everyone in the village about the day the Saudis came with the American bombs? We have to ask ourselves, are we making things better? Is Yemen in our vital national interest? Are we making things better or are we making things worse? Is there a possibility that it will lead to such chaos that al-Qaida of the Arab Peninsula will rise up and become a real threat to us? What else is happening in Yemen? It is one of the poorest countries on the planet, as 17 million people, as we speak, live on the edge of starvation--17 million people. They are having the largest outbreak of cholera. Where is most of this happening? Where is most of the starvation, most of the killing, and most of the cholera? It is in the areas that are being bombed by the Saudis. They have bombed the infrastructure into ruins, and there is no clean water, so cholera is spreading. War is probably the most common and most important precipitating factor in humanitarian disasters. If you look at humanitarian disasters around the world, you will find that the No. 1 cause is war, and Yemen was already a poor place to begin with. You are fighting the war, and nobody asked your permission. You are fighting a war in Yemen through the proxy of Saudi Arabia, and no one has asked my permission. This is a grave insult to us. It is dangerous to the Treasury, but it is also your sons and daughters who are being asked to go to Yemen now. We had a manned raid in Yemen and lost one of our Navy SEALs. I have asked what we got, and they just sort of push me off and say, oh, they might tell me on another occasion. No one will tell me what we got. They claim that it was great, that it was the best stuff you could ever find, that it is going to prevent loss of life. But the thing is, we have no business in Yemen. We have not voted to go to war in Yemen. We have been at war 16 years--the longest war now--in Afghanistan. There is no purpose left. There is no future for the war in Afghanistan. Today's vote will be remembered as the first vote--if we have it--in 16 years on whether to continue fighting everywhere, all the time, without ever having to renew the authorization of Congress. I hope Senators will think long and hard about the seven ongoing wars and, at the very least, show regard for our young soldiers and go on the record to uphold their oath of office. Each Senator should uphold their oath of office and defend the Constitution and its requirements with regard to war. I, for one, will stand with soldiers, young and brave, sent to fight in distant lands in a forgotten, forever war. I will stand for the Constitution. I will stand with our Founding Fathers, who did everything possible to make the initiation of war difficult. I hope my colleagues will stand for something. I hope my colleagues will finally vote to do their constitutional duty and oversee and/or discontinue the many wars we are in. But even if my colleagues say: War, war--that is the answer--everywhere, all the time, by golly, come down and put your name on it. If you think we should be at war in Afghanistan, vote for it. If you think we should be at war in Yemen, come down to the floor and vote for it. What does everybody do? Pass the buck. Let the President do it. Let the President take the blame if things don't go well. We should vote. So on my amendment, you will probably see that the majority will say: We don't want any responsibility; let the President take care of that. My vote isn't actually directly on any of the wars, although I do oppose most of the wars we are involved in. My vote is on whether or not we should vote on whether we should be at war. So for those who oppose my vote, they oppose the Constitution. They oppose obeying the Constitution, which says that we are supposed to vote. They are going to say: No, I refuse to vote on any of these wars. All my amendment does is to sunset an authorization that really doesn't apply to anything we are doing at the moment, and it says that in 6 months' time, you have to come up with an authority to go to war. I hope my colleagues will stand for something. I hope they will finally vote to do their constitutional duty. It is the least we can do to honor the service of our brave young soldiers. Thank you, Mr. President. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Madam President, in Washington, we have a disease--or a syndrome rather. I call it the dinosaur syndrome: big hearts, small brains. Unfortunately, it is a recurring problem year after year, bill after bill, day after day. In Washington, it is argued that you are more compassionate if you give away more of someone else's money. I would argue that true compassion is in giving your own money away. I would argue that truly rational policy is giving away money that you have. It is one thing to give away other people's money. It is another thing to give away money you do not even possess. As a country, we have a $20 trillion debt. We borrow $1 million every minute. Yet we are putting forward a bill to allocate $15 billion to those who are suffering from Harvey without paying for it and without finding the money from anywhere. We are simply adding it to our tab--adding it to our $20 trillion bill. How did we get to $20 trillion in debt? Big hearts, small brains. Nobody has the courage to ask: Why don't we pay for it? Why don't we be legislators and stand up like men and women and say: Let's set priorities. If it is a priority to help those in Texas--and I have great sympathy for those in Texas. My family is there. I have family members with 2 feet of water in their house so I have great sympathy for those who are in need, but there is no reason to be foolish. We shouldn't just borrow the money. Why don't we take the money from something less important? My amendment, the America first amendment, would take the money from money we are going to send to foreign countries. We send billions and billions of dollars to countries that hate us. We send billions and billions of dollars to countries that burn our flag. I think it is a very simple choice, when we are looking at helping those in need in our country, that we quit sending money to other countries. What my amendment would do would be to pay for the $15 billion in aid by taking it out of the foreign aid account. Who gets the money in the foreign aid account? What is it spent on? I will give you a couple of examples of what we spend our foreign aid on. We spent billions of dollars--I think it is over $100 billion--on building roads in Afghanistan, blowing up roads in Afghanistan, building schools, blowing up schools, and then rebuilding all of them. Sometimes we blow them up, and sometimes someone else blows them up, but then we always go back and rebuild them. What about rebuilding our country? Why don't we look at our country and rebuild our infrastructure and rebuild our roads? For those who are flooded in Texas, let's help them, but let's help them by not sending the money to Pakistan and to other countries that do not even like us. In the foreign aid account, we spent $273 million last year teaching people how to apply for more of our money. So it is not bad enough that they take your money and send it to foreign countries that do not even like us, but we teach these people how to apply for more of our money. We had a televised cricket league that we spent $1 million on in Afghanistan--a televised cricket league. The only problem is, they don't really have any televisions. Why it is our obligation? Why is the U.S. taxpayer asked to pay for a cricket league in Afghanistan? We spent $45 million on a natural gas, gas station in Afghanistan-- $45 million. It was estimated to cost a half a million dollars--86 times cost overruns. What does it serve up? Gasoline. Natural gas. Who has a car that runs on natural gas in Afghanistan? Nobody. So we bought them cars. We bought them cars that run on natural gas. Then they had no money with which to buy the natural gas so we gave them credit cards to buy the natural gas. That is where your money is going. If you want to help the people in Texas or those people who may be hurt in Florida, why don't we quit sending the money overseas? These are the people who chant ``Death to America,'' and we send more money to them. We spent money on home mortgages in Nigeria. We are spending money on home mortgages in Nigeria? We spent money on tourism in Albania. This is one of my favorites: We spent money teaching people in Kenya how to use Facebook. All I am asking is, Why don't we stand up like men and women, like real legislators? If we are going to have compassion for those in Texas, why don't we have the good wisdom not to just simply add it to our debt? In hysteria--everyone is hysterical--we must give, give, give someone else's money but not only that. We must give, give, give money we do not have. We are going to destroy our country. There have been people who have argued that our $20 trillion debt is the No. 1 threat to our national security. So what I am asking is, Why don't we pay for this? Why don't we simply take some money that we were going to spend somewhere else, for something not as valuable in another country, and spend it here? You realize what is going to happen. I will proffer this amendment, and in all likelihood, the swamp--the establishment--will vote this down because they never want to cut a dime of spending. They are always compassionate. They have big hearts. They are willing to give away everybody else's money, but they are never ever willing to pay for it. This is both parties--both the Republican Party and the Democrat Party. Watch the vote and see who is a conservative and who says we should pay for the aid for Harvey and who says, oh, no, that we should add it to the tab. Where is the $15 billion going to come from? This year, we are going to run a $500 billion debt. There is no money. They are giving away your grandchildren's money to help people. People will say that is compassion, that we are going to help people now. Yet we are stealing it from our kids' futures, and we are stealing it from the future and the soundness of our country, and we are threatening the very security of our country with this enormous and elaborate debt. Simply pay for it. Simply say: Do you know what? This year, we cannot be so compassionate to people who are wanting to get healthcare in Cambodia. We have USAID money going to Cambodia to help them get cost- effective or lower cost insurance. We could not even do anything with the healthcare in our country. We failed to act on it, but we are sending money to Cambodia to help them with their healthcare. Why don't we act here at home? Why don't we take care of our own problems before we think we can take care of everybody else's problems everywhere around the world? So we will get a chance to vote today. My amendment will come up shortly, and it will simply say, yes, we are a big, rich country. We can help those in Texas, but we will pay for it by taking the money away from somewhere else in the budget that is less of a priority. We give hundreds of millions--really billions--of dollars to Pakistan. How much do they like us? Sometimes they help us, but sometimes they harbor the enemy. Sometimes they harbor whole networks of people who are plotting to kill us. What do they think of Christianity in Pakistan? Asia Bibi is a Christian. She has been in jail for 5 years--on death row--for being a Christian. What do they think of helping us with bin Laden? They did not raise a finger to help us with bin Laden. Bin Laden lived among them for years and years and years, and when we finally got bin Laden, we got bin Laden with information from a doctor named Shakil Afridi. What did Pakistan do to reward the doctor who helped us get bin Laden? Pakistan has him locked up for life in prison. Really, we need to requestion whether this aid works at all to foreign countries, whether it is counterproductive, and whether we have it in the first place, but we should also ask an important question: Maybe that aid ought to be better spent at home. Maybe we ought to start rebuilding our country instead of always thinking we have to rebuild everybody else's country. I think this amendment is so easy to decide, and I think the American people are behind me on this amendment. If we were to take this to a huge vote of the entire American public, I think 75 to 80 percent of the American public would say: Do you know what? Let's take care of our problems at home; let's don't send our money abroad. And I think we would win this battle. Watch this vote because in Washington you will see the opposite. You will see three-fourths of this body or more say: Oh, no, we are not going to cut any spending to anyone. We could never cut foreign aid or welfare for foreign countries. We are just going to add it on to the tab. I, for one, want to be a loud voice to say that it is risking our country's future. It is risking the security of the United States to keep adding to a $20 trillion debt, no matter how good the cause is. Remember, the next time a politician tells you that they are so compassionate because they want to give away more of someone else's money, ask them how much they gave of their own money if you want to judge their true compassion. Thank you.

Mr. PAUL

Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I object.