if government is the opposite of liberty the government in our country was created to protect liberty. unfortunately in the past few decades they have been misled and they are stealing the liberty from us. but something pretty big is happening in this country not only with the selection, but a change in sentiment, a lot of enthusiasm now for the cause of more freedom and less government, less war, and a free market economy. we do a fair amount of criticizing the current administration, which deserves it, and but our problems didn t occur in the last three years. our problems have been around for a long time. unfortunately it s been a bipartisan affair too often.
i offered an amendment that said to declare war. when i discussed it, i want i don t want the war, i m going to vote against this amendment. but if you want the war, you should go to war in a proper fashion and vote it up or down. and, of course, they ridiculed this, they didn t want to vote, they voted. the voice vote was all no, they didn t want to pass it. then i forced them to have a recorded vote which further annoyed them. they didn t want to be on record, and of course everybody voted against it. in the discussion, the chairman of the committee explained that i was offbase to talk about the constitution, because he explained it to me, he says that part of the constitution is anachronistic, we don t follow it anymore. this constitution in a way has become anachronistic.
you know, the problems that have had since 9/11 have been significant. that was a bad day for all americans. many americans died. it was a very, very tough time. i was supportive of going after those individuals who were responsible and we should have done it, and we did do it, but unfortunately it provided an opportunity for our government to do a lot of things they shouldn t have done and used it as an excuse. for instance, this was their excuse to do something that they had been waiting to do, and that was to invade and overthrow the government of iraq. iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. that war was totally unnecessary, and it was based on false assumptions and lies. now, there was a simple little procedure placed in the
if we re going to have rule of law, peace and prosperity, we have to force the people who represent us. the president on down saying only people there who know hose to read and understand and will take their oath of office seriously. but because we have delivered solve power to the executive branch, we go to war without declaration, we have delivered the legislative process to the executive branch. technically under our constitution only the legislative body, the congress, writes laws. thing of all the regulations, the federal register. thousands and thousands of pages, and every year the numbers go up. i would like to be the first president that actually shrunk the size of the federal register.
constitution to try to prevent wars of that sort. the provision is simply that presidents aren t allow to go to war without a declaration of war. the congress and the people through their congressman are supposed to make these declarations. i was serving on the international affairs committee when the resolution was coming along to give this they re to the president. it wasn t a declaration of war, so i want, look, this is going to lead to war. what they want to do is just give the authority to the president to do whatever he thought was necessary. they had been wanting the war for about six or seven years before this. my first speech against the oncoming war was in 1998, because it was announced by our administration that our policy was the overthrow of the government of iraq. so when the debate came up, i offered an amendment to the blanket gives of authority to the president to do whatever he wanted.