Repealing the Authorizations for Use of Military Force Against Iraq--

Floor Speech

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Mr. YOUNG. Mr. President, I appreciate very much my colleague from Florida's continued focus on the need to fully account for what went wrong with the Biden administration's horribly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan; however, I regret that I must oppose his amendment because this is not the right venue for establishing a committee of this nature.

In the coming months, we are going to consider the annual National Defense Authorization Act, and important oversight issues such as the ones raised in the amendment by the gentleman from Florida should be debated within that context and that framework.

This legislative effort to remove outdated authorities that were put in place two decades ago for a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq to prevent them from abuse in the future has to be kept, in my estimation, as clean as possible to enable them to be signed into law without further delay.

As I said before, by allowing these authorizations to live on long past their original purpose, Congress has forfeited the power to authorize military force to the executive branch.

I know my colleague from Florida cares deeply about oversight issues, as evidenced by this amendment, so I hope he and I can work together both to pass a clean repeal of these two outdated authorizations and then discuss robust oversight measures for Afghanistan within the confines of the NDAA process.

In closing, I would urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment in order to keep this bill a clean repeal of the 1991 and 2002 authorizations. Vote on Amendment No. 13
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