This is a condensed version of the speech Representative Kucinich gave on March 31 on the House floor.

MR. SPEAKER, THE CRITICAL issue before this nation today is not Libyan democracy; it is American democracy. Our dear nation stands at a crossroads. The direction we take will determine not what kind of nation we are but what kind of nation we will become. Will we become a nation which plots in secret to wage war? Will we become a nation that observes our Constitution only in matters of convenience?

Will we become a nation which destroys the unity of the world community painstakingly pieced together from the ruins of World War II, a war which itself followed a war to end all wars?

Now, once again we stand poised at a precipice—forced to the edge by an Administration which has thrown caution to the winds and our Constitution to the ground.

It is abundantly clear from a careful reading of our Declaration of Independence that our nation was born from nothing less than the rebellion of the human spirit against the arrogance of power.

The power to declare war is firmly and explicitly vested in the Congress of the United States under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

Let us make no mistake about it, dropping 2,000-pound bombs and unleashing the massive firepower of our Air Force on the capital of a sovereign state is in fact an act of war and no amount of legal acrobatics can make it otherwise.

It is that same arrogance of power which the former Senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, saw shrouded in the deceit which carried us into the abyss of the war in Vietnam. We determined we would never again see another Vietnam. It was the awareness of the unchecked power and arrogance of the executive which led Congress to pass the War Powers Act.

The Congress through the War Powers Act provided the executive with an exception to unilaterally respond only when the nation was in actual or imminent danger: to “repel sudden attacks.”

Today we are in a constitutional crisis because our chief executive has assumed for himself powers to wage war which are neither expressly defined nor implicit in the Constitution, nor permitted under the War Powers Act. This is a challenge not just to the Administration, but to Congress itself: The President has no right to wrest that fundamental power from Congress—and we have no right to cede it to him.

We, Members of Congress, can no more absolve our President of his responsibility to obey this profound constitutional mandate than we can absolve ourselves of our failure to rise to the instant challenge that is before us today.

We violate our sacred trust to the citizens of the United States and our oath to uphold the Constitution if we surrender this great responsibility and through our own inaction acquiesce in another terrible war.

We must courageously defend the oath that we took to defend the Constitution of the United States of America or we forfeit our right to participate in representative government.

How can we pretend to hold other sovereigns to fundamental legal principles through wars in foreign lands if we do not hold our own Presidents to fundamental legal principles at home?

We are staring into the maelstrom of war in Libya. And the code of behavior we are establishing today sets a precedent for the potential of evermore violent maelstroms ahead in Syria, Iran, and the horrifying chaos of generalized war throughout the Middle East. Our continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to being engulfed in this generalized war.

In two years, we have moved from President Bush’s doctrine of preventive war to President Obama’s assertion of the right to go to war without even the pretext of a threat to our nation.

This Administration is now asserting the right to go to war because a nation may threaten force against those who have internally taken up arms against it. Our bombs began dropping even before the U.N.’s International Commission of Inquiry could verify allegations of murder of noncombatant civilians by the Qaddafi regime.

The Administration deliberately avoided coming to Congress and furthermore rejects the principle that Congress has any role in this matter. Yesterday we learned that the Administration would forge ahead with military action even if Congress passed a resolution constraining the mission. This is a clear and arrogant violation of our Constitution.

The Administration’s new war doctrine will lead not to peace, but to more war.

The President cannot say that Libya is an imminent or actual threat. He cannot say that war against Libya is in our vital interest. He cannot say that Libya had the intention or capability of attacking the United States. He has not claimed Libya had weapons of mass destruction to be used against us.

Is this is truly a humanitarian intervention? What is humanitarian about providing to one side of a conflict the ability to wage war against the other side of a conflict, which will inevitably trigger a civil war turning Libya into a graveyard?

What are the fundamental principles at stake in America today?

First and foremost is our system of checks and balances built into the Constitution to ensure that important decisions of state are developed through mutual respect and shared responsibility in order to ensure that collective knowledge—indeed, the collective wisdom of the people—is brought to bear.

Our nation has an inherent right to defend itself and a solemn obligation to defend the Constitution. From the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam to the allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we have learned from bitter experience that the determination to go to war must be based on verifiable facts carefully considered.

Finally, civilian deaths are always to be regretted. But, we must understand from our own Civil War 150 years ago that nations must resolve their own conflicts and shape their own destiny internally. However horrible those internal conflicts may be, these local conflicts can become even more dreadful if armed intervention in a civil war results in the internationalization of that conflict.

The belief that war is inevitable makes of war a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The United States, in this new and complex world wracked with great movements of masses to transform their own governments, must itself be open to transformation, away from intervention, away from trying to determine the leadership of other nations, away from covert operations to try to manipulate events, and towards a rendezvous with those great principles of self-determination which gave us birth.

Dennis Kucinich is now in his seventh term representing the Tenth District of Ohio in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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