DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
The war with Iran has been top of mind on Capitol Hill lately. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, where he appealed to lawmakers for more money – tens of billions – for the Trump administration’s continuing war with Iran. Then on Thursday, the House voted to remove U.S. forces from the hostilities. The War Powers Resolution isn’t legally binding but, rather, a symbolic rebuke to President Trump over a war that lawmakers never authorized. In the Senate, a different story – a similar resolution narrowly fell short. This just a month after the Senate joined the House in a concurrent resolution to end the conflict. Joining us now to talk about all of this is Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
JIM KAINE: Debbie, great to be with you today. Thanks.
ELLIOTT: So we’ve seen public opinion increasingly turn against this war in Iran – now five months in. But the president is pushing ahead. These war power votes really have no teeth. That has to be frustrating. What, if anything, else can Congress do to constrain the war?
KAINE: I would say they’re more than a symbolic. They’re a legal statement by the one branch of government that is given the power to declare war in the Constitution – that the war is illegal. And so now both Houses have made that statement. The president can ignore the law. The president can break the law, but the president can’t change the law. He hasn’t done either a removal of troops or submitted a war authorization to Congress. He hasn’t done the latter because he knows it would lose.
But we have other tools. We have the appropriations process before us, and my argument to my colleagues is we do not need to shovel massive increased dollars to the Pentagon while they’re engaged in an illegal war and refuse to put any guardrails up against misuse of the money.
ELLIOTT: So you have power of the purse. You know, you’ve called this war illegal. Does Congress have any recourse when it comes to curtailing the president’s power here?
KAINE: We’ve done the thing that we can. Both Houses of Congress, under Republican majority, have said, you got to end this war. So I think there is the possibility of court action. But that would involve litigators and courts, and that’s probably in somebody else’s province right now. I think the most important thing we can do in Congress is use these appropriations tools, which we’re clearly granted by the Constitution. And, you know, at the very end of the Vietnam War, for example, Congress started to use the appropriations tools much later than they wish they had, but I don’t think we need to wait. We can use them right now.
ELLIOTT: Let’s talk about where things stand. We’ve gotten mixed signals about where the conflict is heading. Just last week, President Trump said he was willing to escalate attacks. Yet the last couple of days have been calm. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz, was on “Fox News Sunday” today and said the president decided to pause U.S. attacks to allow more time for diplomacy. Here’s what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “FOX NEWS SUNDAY”)
MIKE WALTZ: He’s giving talks some space. He’s giving it a little bit of room. We’ve had both Oman and Iran and a number of our other negotiators engaged at every level.
ELLIOTT: Now, you’re on the Senate Armed Services as well as the Foreign Relations Committee. Do you think there’s a diplomatic solution here? What do you think needs to be happening to find an end to the war?
KAINE: There has to be a diplomatic solution. If we can extend the ceasefire, open the straits, end the blockade on Iranian ports, let’s go ahead and have that discussion around a negotiating table and not continue to inflict pain on American citizens and Iranian civilians with more war.
ELLIOTT: Let’s talk money now. We learned from Secretary Hegseth’s appearance in Congress this week that the war effort has cost more than $37 billion. He wants more. And I spoke with an expert just yesterday, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, who studies budgeting and public finance, and she said the real figures could be even higher.
LINDA BILMES: The 37 billion that Secretary Hegseth cited is just the very tippy, tippy tip of the cost iceberg.
ELLIOTT: Can the country afford this war?
KAINE: I think she’s right that 37 billion might be dollars that have already gone out the door. I have a colleague in the Senate, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, who says he thinks the full cost may be closer to 100 billion. So the answer is no. A war that is a bad idea and it’s illegal is, by the very definition of it, unaffordable. One item that I’m asking about is the reconciliation bill last year gave a 153 billion extra dollars to the Pentagon over their appropriated level, and as of early July, 89 billion of that was still unobligated. If you need more money, why not go to the unspent money from last year first rather than coming back to Congress and asking for another $70 billion?
ELLIOTT: That’s Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Senator, thanks for being with us.
KAINE: So glad to be with you. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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