Senator Barbara Boxer
I have consulted and written materials for several members of the U.S. Congress, including the first draft of Senator Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) on the Senate floor, which was intended as a response to President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union speech.
Senate Floor Speech
Ladies and Gentlemen, and Esteemed Colleagues:
As you know, I represent the great state of California. Home of many of America’s finest achievements. One of which is an amusement park called Disneyland, the realization of Walt Disney’s grandest dreams. Many of you have probably been there yourselves.
One of the oldest attractions at Disneyland, an original one, in fact, is Peter Pan’s Flight, where you can live out the childhood fantasy of never growing up. In the Peter Pan vernacular, this is called living in Never-Never Land. Of course, in Disneyland, there are tour guides to show you the way on and the way off.
But it’s not the only Never-Never Land in America. In fact, there’s one right here in Washington. In this very chamber, in fact. But not just here. It extends all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to be your tour guide to this Never-Never Land, where apparently, you never have to grow up.
First stop, the economy. Seriously, can anyone look their constituents in the eye and say, I’ve done all I can to help you make ends meet, to help families get ahead instead of falling ever further behind? This President and his party had a solution, so they told us, to keep the economy going at full-speed. Of course, his solution was tax cuts for the wealthy, while he left the middle class behind.
And now that we’ve seen where tax cuts for the wealthy has gotten us. Here we are on the precipice of another recession. Where the average American isn’t worried about how to pay for the gardening in his family’s Kennebunkport mansion, but how to make next month’s mortgage payment. Or pay for their kid’s college, which has gone up XX percent since 2001, while wages have only gone up XX percent. Or how to pay for an operation that their meager healthcare, if they’re lucky enough to have any, refuses to pay for.
So what does this President and the Republicans offer us to fix this mess they’ve gotten us into? More tax cuts for the wealthy.
Ladies and gentlemen, when the answer to a policy that doesn’t work is to keep doing the same thing and hope for a different outcome, that’s not just madness; that’s living in Never-Never Land.
I know that sometimes it’s hard for those in Washington to put themselves in the shoes of the average American, but imagine if you were a Senior citizen right now. You’re just scraping by, cutting coupons and walking in a pair of old shoes that you can’t afford to replace. You put in your time, you worked hard, and you deserve the American dream of relaxing during your golden years, because that was the pot of gold you’d been promised at the end of the rainbow.
But instead, you work at Wal-Mart for eight bucks an hour, because you don’t have any other choice, except eating dog food and pretending it’s pate.
It’s like you were told that don’t worry, if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll retire at 65. But when you get there, suddenly you’re told, sorry, but we’ve decided that you’ll have to make it to 75 to retire. Or maybe even 80. If you’re lucky. If we don’t decide to raise it to 90 by the time you to 80, and who are we kidding, that’s likely, too.
But, aha!, You hear that Washington is going to offer rebates to help the economy, and you think about finally getting that new pair of shoes, about finally being able to afford a bus pass, maybe about going out to eat for the first time in a year, all things that the rebate is supposedly designed for, to get money back into the economy. But then you learn that no, you’re not getting anything. Yet again, the richest Americans get the breaks, while you get the shaft.
That is not only living in Never-Never Land, but forcing our Seniors, against their will, to live there, too. And that, my friends, is shameful indeed.
But of course, then there’s the ultimate Never-Never Land: Iraq. It’s funny how, during this season of Presidential campaigns, somehow Iraq has been shuffled to the back of the line, out of sight, out of mind, when polls tell us that the terrible economy is at the forefront of people’s concerns.
It’s not that Americans have forgotten about Iraq. It’s that things are so screwed up in every area, this President and his party have failed this county on so many levels, that when people are forced to choose a prime concern, sometimes the first thing they think of is personal.
But let’s not lose sight of a simple fact: the poor economy, and the even worse situation in Iraq are directly tied together, like a skydiver and his parachute plunging toward the earth, hopeful the parachute will open, and understandably fearful if it doesn’t.
In the Republican’s Never-Never Land, we are now spending $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq. That’s $2.5 billion a week. Three hundred and fifty seven million dollars a day.
For the almost $250 million we spent on health centers in Iraq, we could have provided health insurance for a year for 100,000 of the more than 40 million Americans who are uninsured.
For the cost of one week in Iraq, we could fully fund the after school program I authored in No Child Left Behind for an entire year.
For the cost of two weeks in Iraq, we could provide health insurance for a year to six million uninsured children here in the United States.
For less than the cost of three months in Iraq, according to the Joint Economic Committee, the President’s policy has ALREADY cost the average family of four $16,500 dollars. If this policy continues for another decade, the cost to a family of four will be more than $36,000 dollars! It needs to stop.
We are hemorrhaging taxpayers’ money in Iraq. We’re sacrificing funding for critical domestic programs and saddling our children and grandchildren with generations of debt, and the waste associated with this war is beyond disgraceful.
We spent $32 million dollars for a base in Iraq that was never built!
We paid a contractor $72 million dollars to build a barracks for the police academy in Baghdad and instead got a building with “giant cracks snaking through newly built walls and human waste dripping from the ceiling.” And while the contractor said they would fix the building, it remains filthy and unusable more than a year later.
The administration loaded $9 billion dollars in CASH onto pallets and shipped it to Iraq, where it simply disappeared.
It’s gone. The President can’t tell you where it went.
And this is the guy who thinks he can lecture us about fiscal austerity? Now that’s living in Never-Never Land.
Last year, for instance, in the name of austerity, the President vetoed Children’s Health Care. He vetoed education spending and health research.
He vetoed critical investments in our nation’s infrastructure. When the President vetoed the Water Resources Development Act, a bill to fund critical water infrastructure investments like flood control in California and Louisiana, he said “This bill lacks fiscal discipline.” He said, “This is not fiscally responsible.”
This is coming from the President who inherited a budget surplus of $236 billion – the largest surplus in American history – and turned it into the largest budget deficits in history?
This coming from the guy who lectures in his State of the Union that “we are addicted to oil,” then does nothing about it, as gas prices continue to rise. When you have an addiction, you go to rehab, you don’t just cross your fingers and hope for the best. Especially when you’re responsible not just for yourself, but for the entire nation.
But while he couldn’t invest in America – in our families – he was steadfast in insisting that our nation’s taxpayers provide yet another blank check to continue his failed policy in Iraq.
Some of you may not remember it, but the President’s then-Budget Director, Mitch Daniels, told us that the war in Iraq would cost no more than $60 billion dollars. Paul Wolfowitz, assured us that with Iraqi oil revenue, the war would pay for itself. It was not too long ago when those who suggested that the war could cost as much as $200 billion dollars were ridiculed as vastly overstating the cost.
Well, the President has now spent more than half a trillion dollars on his failed policy, and there is, literally, no end in sight. Now, he’s added a “security agreement” designed to tie this body’s hands, this body who constitutionally is required to oversee exactly what he’s decided to decide for himself. And he’s added a signing statement that he thinks means he can ignore our desire to prevent funds to establish permanent bases
Does anybody here, and I mean anybody, Republican or Democrat, really believe that the guy who’s gotten every major decision wrong for the past seven years should continue to make unilateral decisions? Is he protecting our best interests as a nation, or is it more important to him to protect his turf as a megalomaniac?
Perhaps we should ask Vice President Dick Cheney, since we all know he knows the real answer to that question better than anybody. Talk about living in Never-Never Land.
Some Republicans think that they can use our criticism of the Iraq policy as a political winner in the coming elections, that somehow our idea of trying to change course when the current course is a miserable failure makes Democrats look weak on national security. I have a simple answer for them, which may sound familiar: Bring it on.
When the Republicans mission is unarguably unaccomplished, when all they bring to the table is pointing fingers instead of pointing us in the right direction. After all, if you get into a car, and realize you’ve got a drunk driver, sometimes you do more than just grab the keys. Sometimes you are forced to take the wheel yourself to get home safely.
Every stage of the debate about Iraq has been marked by dishonesty, but this refusal to level with the American people about how long we’re going to be in Iraq and what it is going to cost us – this moving the goalposts – gives rise to the biggest lie of them all, because it maintains the illusion that the end of the occupation is just around the corner.
The President’s so-called surge is the most recent example.
The surge was designed to create space for progress on political benchmarks, and that has not happened. By the President’s own measure, the surge has been a failure.
You wouldn’t really know it from reading the news, though. It’s as though the media were operating under some sort of collective amnesia. Its as if, as has been famously said, you repeat a lie enough people believe that it’s the truth.
I think that everyone is grateful that violence in Iraq is down, but it is a mistake to confuse a return to 2005 levels of violence with political reconciliation, and it is simply wrong to suggest that the surge has been a success. Does anyone really think that taking violence from horrific to terrible is a time to declare victory? Oh, wait, apparently the President and the Republicans do. Apparently they bought their condos in Never-Never Land. Of course, their interest-only loans continue to readjust, collapsing the land under their feet.
The administration likes to talk about the situation in Iraq in terms of winning and losing, but the fact is that you cannot “win” an occupation, just as there is no way for the United States to “win” an Iraqi civil war.
Our brave men and women in uniform have performed remarkably. They have done everything we have asked of them – more than 3,800 have made the ultimate sacrifice and more than 27,000 have been wounded serving their country. They have reduced violence with the surge, but the political resolution that the President promised has simply not happened. It is time for us to make sure that the mission they are asked to perform is worthy of their service, a mission that actually can be “accomplished.”
As our own military leaders have told us time and again, there is no military solution to the situation in Iraq.
Redeploying our troops is a prerequisite for any real political progress in Iraq – Iraqis will not take responsibility for their own affairs as long as they believe that they can count on us to do it for them.
A recent Pentagon report that found that virtually the ONLY thing that Iraq’s sectarian groups agree on is that they blame the United States for the violence in Iraq, and they don’t believe national reconciliation will be possible until we leave.
In other words, in terms of bringing about a political solution, we would be better off following the lead of the British.
The same is true of Iraq’s neighbors and the international community – what reason do they have to get serious about a regional stability plan as long as they think we will be there indefinitely?
The fact is that redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq – and ending the President’s failed policy – is also a prerequisite for any successful effort to combat global terrorism. The occupation of Iraq provides terrorists with an invaluable recruiting and fundraising tool at the same time as it ties down the majority of our military resources overseeing an Iraqi civil war. It’s unsustainable, and it’s unacceptable.
We must change the mission from a combat to a training mission, redeploy our troops from Iraq and bring our National Guard home so that we are prepared in the event of domestic emergencies.
We need a diplomatic surge, where we convene an international conference, where we get the regional stakeholders at the table, and we establish an international solution, like the plan of semi-autonomous regions proposed by my colleague, Senator Joe Biden.
After the elections last year, I admitted that I made a mistake. I believed that the President and his allies in the House and the Senate had heard the message, had understood it, and would work with us to respect the wishes of the American people. I believed that they would meet us half way on Iraq. I was wrong.
The President will pursue his failed policy and his wrong-headed priorities to the bitter end. He ignored the suggestions of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. He has ignored the warnings from Congress, and he has disregarded the will of the American people.
The shadow of those decisions hangs over this election year. In November, the American people will go to the polls to elect a new President. They will pick a new House and Senate.
Will the newly-elected stand with the millions of Americans who have demanded an end to the occupation?
Will they truly represent those who are sick of seeing the promise of our nation and the future of our children squandered on a failed policy?
Will they give voice to the millions who believe that it is time for the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own affairs, and who understand that they will not do so as long as they believe that they can count on us to do it for them?
Or will we as a nation continue to stand with a President who has staked his legacy on failed policy after failed policy? Who will sacrifice the lives of our service men and women in Iraq, while at home continuing to reward the wealthiest while ignoring the neediest? All in the name of standing firm and resolute, even when you’re undoubtedly, unequivocally dead wrong?
That is called living in Never-Never Land. And this November, when the American people get to make a simple choice: stay on the crash course we’re on, or change our path, I’m confident they’ll have a simple answer: it’s time to grow up.
Thank you.
