Three days after 9/11, Rep. Barbara Lee cast the only vote against the war on terror. She was branded a traitor for it. A quarter-century later, the record shows she was right all along.
We’re still living in the world 9/11 created
The impacts of the horrific terrorism attacks of 9/11 continue to be felt here in America. Have we learned the lessons of that fateful day?
Twenty-five years ago, 9/11 hit America like nothing before it. Once the initial shock of the terrorist attacks wore off, the country wanted justice – fast.
Three days later, Congress voted on the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a resolution letting the president wage war on whoever he decided was responsible, anywhere, with no fixed enemy and no end date.
The resolution seemed entirely reasonable at the time. The country was rallying around its president, who’d pledged to “rid the world of evil.”
It passed the House and Senate by a combined vote of 518-1.
Only one member of Congress saw the danger and voted no: Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California. A quarter-century later, it’s time we admitted how right she was.
Rep. Barbara Lee voted against blanket presidential authority after 9/11
Lee was no pacifist. Her father and her ex-husband were both veterans, and she agonized over the vote. Her own chief of staff had a cousin who died on United Flight 93. She believed some military response was called for.
But on the third day of the nation’s grief, Lee walked to the House floor and explained why she was voting no anyway.
“This unspeakable act … has forced me to rely on my moral compass, my conscience, and my God for direction,” she said. She said she was convinced military action wouldn’t prevent more terrorism, and that “some of us must urge restraint.”
Then she quoted a clergyman from a memorial service she’d attended that morning: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”
The response was swift. Lee’s office was flooded with calls denouncing her as a traitor. Death threats came in fast enough that she needed a 24-hour security detail. A congressional opponent’s supporters marched in a parade behind a sign reading “Barbara Lee hates America.”
“There were a lot of haters out there,” she said later. “There were a lot of Barbara Lee haters.”
The 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, have proven Lee correct
But Lee was right. The AUMF has been cited 41 times as the legal basis for military operations in 19 countries, from the Philippines to the Horn of Africa. It has now outlived four presidents from both parties, all of them cashing the same blank check.
Did we become “the evil we deplore”? Not entirely. But there was Abu Ghraib and the black sites, men tortured in America’s name by a program the Senate later found didn’t even work. There’s Guantánamo, where 15 men remain, some still held without charge. There’s somewhere north of 900,000 dead in the wars that followed, more than 300 times the toll of the day that launched them.
Lee spent the next two decades in Congress, introducing a repeal of the AUMF several times. But it’s still on the books. She is now mayor of Oakland.
I’m a contrarian by nature. My rule is that the more total the consensus, the more skeptical I get. Not because consensus is usually wrong – it usually isn’t – but because the conditions that produce a 518-1 vote are rarely the conditions that produce careful thinking.
Fear, pain and grief generally don’t make us think straight. But those are exactly the moments when a lone dissenting voice deserves not just a polite hearing, but careful consideration. The dissenter may well be wrong. But everyone else may be making the same mistake.
Twenty-five years on, it’s not too late to say Lee was right.
Daniel Allott, USA TODAY’s conservative opinion editor, is the author of the book “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation.”