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Oakland congresswoman wages lonely battle over presidents war authority
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: September 4th, 2017
http://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Oakland-congresswo...
Sixteen years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the sole member of Congress to vote against authorizing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Throughout the presidencies of Bush and Barack Obama, Lee waged a lonely crusade to repeal the war resolution initially aimed at al Qaedas Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. Last month, she won a stunning victory when a bipartisan House committee voted to repeal the authorization in an amendment to the 2018 defense spending bill. But her win was short-lived. House Republican leaders stripped the amendment from the bill without a vote in a late-night maneuver that blocked Lee from leading a larger House debate on the presidents use of military force without further approval by Congress. The 2001 authorization was passed by Congress three days after the 9/11 attacks. It was hastily written; it was overly broad; it was 60 words, Lee said. Citing the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, Lee said presidents have used the authorization at least 37 times since the initial Afghanistan invasion in October 2001. The [current] administration, Lee noted, has proposed severe cuts to domestic spending to pay for a bigger military. Escalating the Afghanistan conflict, she said, will come at the expense of schools and infrastructure and jobs and health care - all the nation-building resources that we need here, here in my own district. Yet theyre cutting these programs to fund these wars, and thats ... unfair to the country, she said.
Note: Read about the unprecedented plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan. According to Congressman Thomas Massie, the US government has made deals with the Taliban to give them electricity and turn a blind eye to their opium trade. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
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