[Peace] Compare & Contrast: Chris Murphy vs. Chris Coons on Ending the Unconstitutional Yemen War

[Robert Naiman]

Compare & Contrast: Chris Murphy vs. Chris Coons on Ending the
Unconstitutional Yemen War

Let me be perfectly clear, as Barack Obama used to say. I am not
campaigning for Chris Murphy to become Secretary of State. I have no idea
if Chris Murphy actually wants to be Secretary of State, or if he is simply
speaking out now on foreign policy issues as he has for years, exactly as
Murphy’s office says.

But I do know that Chris Coons is a candidate, because Chris Coons says so
himself. I also know that the same forces who wanted Iran deal opponent Ted
Deutch to become HFAC Chair when Eliot Engel was defeated are backing Chris
Coons, because Politico reported that. I also know that the forces who
wanted Ted Deutch to become HFAC Chair tried to create an aura of
inevitability around his candidacy, to gaslight people into believing that
it was a done deal and that resistance to Deutch was futile. And it looks
to me like this is what the people supporting Chris Coons are trying to do
now, which wouldn’t be surprising at all since it’s the same crowd and
that’s how they roll. So the “campaign” for the Secretary of State slot is
on, because Chris Coons and the forces supporting Chris Coons are making it
be on. And regardless of whether Chris Murphy is actually a candidate, his
name was mentioned in the Politico article as someone in the mix, so Chris
Murphy is a germane standard of comparison to understand who Chris Coons is
and what he represents.

Chris Murphy has been “good on ending the unconstitutional Yemen war” since
before there were any legislative vehicles to try to do something about the
war to be good or bad on. Chris Murphy was the principal Democratic author
of the first legislative vehicle to try to do something about the war, in
early 2016, when Obama was still POTUS. Indeed, it was reading a speech by
Chris Murphy against the Yemen war in early 2016 that convinced me to try
to end the Yemen war in Congress. Before I saw Chris Murphy’s speech, I
believed that it would be futile to try to end the Yemen war in Congress,
because that’s what I’d been told to believe by people that I used to
trust. When I read Chris Murphy’s speech, I searched the internet for
“Chris Murphy” and “Yemen,” and discovered that it was Murphy’s SECOND
speech against the war. When I saw that it was Chris Murphy’s SECOND speech
against the war, my eyes went wide. “Murphy’s trying to do something about
this,” I said to myself. “Let’s try to organize people to follow Murphy.”

Chris Coons has not always been good on ending the Yemen war, even when
efforts to do something about it were well underway. He voted against the
first effort led by Murphy, Rand Paul, and Al Franken to try to do
something, in September 2016, when 27 Senators voted the right way. He
voted against the Sanders-Lee-Murphy Yemen War Powers Resolution in March
2018, when most Senate Democrats supported it.

The point of bringing this up now is not to punish Chris Coons for being
bad on ending the Yemen war in the past, although there would be nothing
wrong with that, that would be normal political activity to try to end and
prevent wars. The point is to understand what kind of person Chris Coons
is. When we “hire” a politician, we’re hiring them to act in rooms that we
won’t be able to see into. It’s important to try to understand what kind of
person they are.

One of the things that we accomplished between early 2016 and now is that
we created a paper trail in the Senate and the House on the Yemen war. A
key reason that we have endless wars is that Congressional leaders work to
prevent contested votes that would allow us to hold Members of Congress
accountable. There’s no paper trail on the other wars now like there is now
on the Yemen war. This is why it’s so important that the War Powers
Resolution and the Arms Export Control Act have trigger mechanisms that
allow Members of Congress to force votes. It’s no accident that these laws
were passed in 1973 and 1976, following years of popular activism against
the Vietnam War and other U.S. foreign policy abuses that were never
authorized by Congressional vote.

Unfortunately, we haven’t ended the Yemen war yet. Biden has promised that
if elected, he will end the Yemen war. If past is prologue, there will
likely be pushback, including from Democrats. Look at the pushback Obama
got from Democrats like Ted Deutch and Eliot Engel on the Iran deal, even
though Obama was elected promising to do that and base Democratic activists
who supported Obama were overwhelmingly in support. If there is pushback
against efforts to end the Yemen war in a Biden presidency, who do you want
as Secretary of State? Surely not Chris Coons, who voted for the Yemen war
before he voted against it.
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