(BIVN) – U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D, Hawaiʻi) criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to take military action in Iran, calling it a “war of choice” that does not represent the will of the American people. 

“There was no imminent threat from Iran,” said Sen. Schatz, speaking from the Senate floor on Monday. “The indications right up until the attacks were that negotiations were actually trending well.” 

“This is the president of the United States asserting that he can do whatever he wants, wherever he wants, with the most powerful military in history at his disposal,” said Sen. Schatz, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Operation Epic Fury commenced on February 28 at the direction of President Trump. The ongoing military strikes are intended to “dismantle the Iranian regime’s security apparatus, prioritizing locations that posed an imminent threat,” stated a U.S. Central Command news release. “Targets included Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities, Iranian air defense capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields.”

U.S. officials say Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died in one of the air strikes, along with other top Iranian officials.

“Iran’s formerly Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is dead,” President Trump said in a recent video address. “This wretched and vile man had the blood of hundreds and even thousands of Americans on his hands and was responsible for the slaughter of countless thousands of innocent people all across many countries.” 

As of 4 p.m. EST on March 2nd, six U.S. service members have been killed in action.

Hawaiʻi representatives in Congress were quick to decry the decision to strike Iran.

“The President’s unilateral decision to strike Iran for purposes of regime change is a clear violation of the Constitution, which gives Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war,” said Senator Mazie Hirono (D, Hawaiʻi), a Senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “What’s more, this President has not articulated a clear strategy for what comes next. I fear that he is recklessly putting the lives of our servicemembers and personnel in the region at risk.”

The following is a transcript of Sen. Schatz’s remarks made Monday on the Senate floor, which included comment on an upcoming War Powers resolution vote, which could block the use of American forces in Iran.

Senator Brian Schatz: This is a war of choice. It did not have to happen. There was no imminent threat from Iran. The indications right up until the attacks were that negotiations were actually trending well. And remember that if Donald Trump hadn’t pulled out of the JCPOA to begin with, Iran’s nuclear program would have continued to be managed.

This is the president of the United States asserting that he can do whatever he wants, wherever he wants, with the most powerful military in history at his disposal. It is important to point out that a lot of people put Donald Trump in office because he promised to oppose forever wars. It was central to his foreign policy pitch as a candidate for over a decade. But what we’ve seen in the past two months alone is a president that is eager to use kinetic force as a first option and then figure it out from there. And the challenge with the Venezuela action was that our men and women in the military and intelligence agencies, they executed that thing so efficiently and effectively, that I think Donald Trump got it into his head. ‘This is great. What else you got? This is great. What are we doing this in Cuba? Are we doing this in Iran? What else you got?’ And so he gets on an airplane, and he starts shooting the breeze with members of the Republican Congress, and he decides in that moment, on Air Force One, to start a war.

In the days after capturing Nicolas Maduro, the administration offered up confusing and contradictory claims. They said that the United States was going to run Venezuela indefinitely, but then left most of the illegitimate Maduro regime in place. They said that American companies would go in and rebuild the refineries, even though most of the American companies said they wanted nothing to do with it. And maybe most confusingly, they said that the United States would control oil sales, but not the revenue from those sales. Two months later, we still don’t know what their plan is, and that was easy compared to this. That was easy compared to this.

There is no coherent strategy, much less an attempt to even explain it. I want everybody to understand how unique this is in American history – maybe world history. To have a leader say, ‘I declare war, and I’ll let you know why later. I’m going to send Secretary Hegseth out there to say some things that are kind of indecipherable.’ Then Secretary Rubio, certainly a better communicator, but also still indecipherable. And then the president of the United States has a press conference, presumably to explain himself. And he’s personally so distracted by the ballroom renovation that it makes me sound like I’m some person who is so obsessed with Donald Trump that I watch MSNBC – I have a IV drip of MSNBC and TikTok to make me hate this president – but actually that’s what he did. He took a kinetic action against another country. And then when it was his time to explain why, he sort of talked a bit about it, but then he was really passionate about the curtains that he chose, about the color of the ballroom, about the jackhammers running from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.. That’s his passion. And he is letting these neoconservatives run wild within his administration.

And I want to make a very specific point about tomorrow’s, hopefully, tomorrow’s, War Powers resolution, introduced by Senator Kaine and others to block the use of American forces in Iran. I will support that, of course. But make no mistake. If a War Powers Resolution is defeated, that does not constitute an authorization of the use of military force. The way this works, right, is that a president has some flexibility to basically take a kinetic action, to use the United States military to protect American interests if there is an imminent threat. What do we mean by imminent threat? It is what it sounds like. They’re about to attack us.

And Secretary Rubio, again, very good communicator, and I talk to him all the time. He said it about an hour and a half ago. He said the imminent threat – I want you to listen to this logic chain. The imminent threat to the United States was that Israel was going to attack Iran, and we anticipated that in retaliation, Iran was going to attack our interests, therefore imminent threat. That’s not what we mean by imminent threat. There are no bank shots when we’re describing an imminent threat. If we want to conduct a war of choice, and we have in the past, we need hearings. We need briefings. We need a proper debate. And then we need a vote on the authorization of the use of military force. That is foundational to the oath of office that we took when we became United States Senators.

This is actually not a particularly controversial point, except that we’re in this very weird moment where I think the public was sort of not tracking at all that maybe the president was going to wake up one morning and go, ‘Why don’t we go to war with Iran? I’ll explain it to you over a period of time.’ And I understand that his method of communication is, if nothing else, rather unconventional and meandering and contingent, and he thinks he’s preserving his optionality. Maybe it’ll be short, maybe it’ll be long. We’ll see what happens. All that stuff. You can’t do that with the American people. The American people are not his negotiating counterpart. They are the foundation that you need if you are going to take a military action. If you’re going to go to war, you need the American people behind you. And you need them to understand why in the heck are we doing this.

Do I think Iran is a malevolent actor in the region and even across the planet? Of course I do. But that’s not the question at hand. The question at hand is, why in the world are we trying to do another regime change? Iraq, Libya, Vietnam. I don’t care what you think should happen. This is a question of what is very likely to happen based on what always happens when our extraordinary, trained, courageous military executes well, and in the first couple of days, there’s two things that everybody does. They correctly praise are United States service members. And then if anybody raises any objections, they go, ‘Oh, you want that bad guy still in power? Is that what you want?’ Of course, I don’t want a bad guy in power. However, the world is full of bad guys in power. And so the question at hand is not do I wish there were better people in charge of other countries, but rather has it met the threshold for the United States government to declare war against another country, especially in a region where we keep screwing it up.

That’s not a rhetorical flourish. I sound like Donald Trump a year-and-a-half ago. He just is so fixated. I don’t know if it’s the ballroom or his legacy or some sort of revenge fantasy about Iran, but this man is not thinking clearly, either politically or geo-strategically. Geo-strategically, this is a terrible decision, and he has no plan for what happens next. His view is, just like Venezuela, we’re going to decapitate the person we don’t like, we’ll get a client state. Not so easy in Iran, not so easy in Iran. And these things have a terrible tendency to metastasize. They really do. And after the Iraq War, my goodness, I thought there was going to be bipartisan consensus that we are not going to go into a war of choice again.

Congress has a duty not just to check a reckless president, but also to represent the will of the people. And the American people, left, right and center, do not want another regime change war in the Middle East. It’s about time our president started paying attention to the American people.