Kerry’s Confirmation Hearing Was Mostly Smooth, Except For This Rand Paul Grilling…
By and large, most media accounts of yesterday’s Senate confirmation hearings for Sen. John Kerry‘s appointment to Secretary of State indicate the proceedings were “smooth.” However, Sen. Rand Paul provided one of the few tense moments of the hearings, grilling Sen. Kerry on his support for America’s past unauthorized attacks, his support for unilateral interventions, and his views on what the Constitution allows for military policy.
Sen. Paul began by telling Kerry that he agrees with the 2007 presidential candidate version of Barack Obama who said that the president does not have any constitutional power to unilaterally authorize a military attack. “Do you agree with candidate Barack Obama or do you agree with President Obama who took us to war in Libya without congressional authority, unilaterally?” the Republican senator asked.
After expressing his support for the War Powers Act of 1973, a federal law intending to check the president’s power to authorize military attacks, Kerry couched that “there are occasions which I have supported where a President of the United States has to make a decision immediately and implement that decision, execute on it immediately.” He explained that this means, in the past, he supported Pres. Reagan’s use of force in Grenada, Pres. G.H.W. Bush’s sending troops into Panama, and Pres. Clinton’s use of the military in Bosnia and Kosovo. “I think [Pres. Obama] behaved in that tradition,” Kerry said of the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya’s civil war.
“I would argue that the Constitution has no exceptions for when you are having a tough time or people disagree with you that you just go ahead and do it,” Paul interjected. “After Vietnam, you were quite critical of the bombing in Cambodia, because I think you felt it wasn’t authorized by Congress. Has your opinion changed about the bombing in Cambodia?”
After Kerry indicated he still feels negatively about the Cambodia bombings and the Vietnam War, Paul asked, “Is Cambodia different than Libya?”
“It is,” Kerry answered, “because it was an extension of the war that was being prosecuted without the involvement of Congress after a number of years. That’s very different.”
“Different length of time, but similar circumstances — a bombing campaign unauthorized by Congress,” Paul retorted. “See, the Constitution doesn’t give this kind of latitude to sometimes go to war and to sometimes not go to war.”
That exchange below:
Paul again praised candidate Obama for declaring that no president should go to war unilaterally because the Constitution doesn’t allow it. But Kerry fired back, “The problem is, it just doesn’t work in some instances when 10,000 people are to be wiped out by a brutal dictator and need to make a quick judgment about engagement, you can’t rely on a Congress that has proven itself unwilling to move after weeks and months.”
The Kentucky senator then challenged Kerry over whether it’s “great” to send weaponry to leaders like Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi who has called Zionists “blood suckers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”
“They are degrading comments and unacceptable by anybody’s standard and I think they have to be appropriately apologized for,” Kerry said before Paul interrupted that the reality is that these leaders are “not going to change their behavior.”
Kerry responded that Morsi has clarified the remarks, and told Paul that “this is always the complication in dealings in the international sector: not everything lends itself to a simple clarity, black, white, this, that, every time.”
“I know things aren’t black and white,” Paul tried to interject, but Kerry continued: “[The Egyptians] have had an election. They had a constitutional promise. … The fact that sometimes other countries elect somebody that you don’t completely agree with doesn’t give us permission to walk away from their election.”
Paul replied that “this has been our problem with foreign policy for decades,” criticizing both Democratic and Republican support for the funding of Osama bin Laden during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the funding of the Afghan mujahideen, and the support for “radical jihadists” during the 1980s all “because they were the enemy of our enemy,” and yet those weapons come back to threaten American allies and interests.
Watch the full exchange below, via C-SPAN:
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