Today, I delivered testimony before the Maine Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee in favor of Representative Heidi Sampson's Defend the Guard legislation:

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Senator Luccini, Representative Ciazzo, and members of the Joint Standing Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs, I am Eric Brakey, former Maine Senator from Androscoggin County, and I am before you today to testify in favor of LD 1285, Defend the Guard.

Do you remember where were you twenty years ago when the first Maine boots hit the ground in Afghanistan?

While I may be a younger citizen than most on this committee, I am old enough to remember the start of that war and the justification for it.

That is not true for our youngest men and women in uniform: born after the war began and sent off to fight foreign young men and women who were also born after the War in Afghanistan began.

This began as a mission for justice and that mission was accomplished. Bin Laden was killed ten years ago. All his co-conspirators today rot in graves or jail cells.

Yet the mission kept changing --- first from a mission of justice, then to a mission of nation-building, and now to a mission so foggy and unclear that no one can name it.

After two decades of mission creep, the recently declassified Afghanistan Papers revealed that top military officials have no clear idea of what victory looks like in Afghanistan.

Huge bipartisan majorities --- among both veterans and the American public at large --- say it's past time to bring our troops home.

Yet a tangled web of private special interest influences holds back Congress from taking action, as they passively allow the war to drag on for the benefit of war profiteers.

As US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor recipient famously said, “War is a racket.”

Washington D.C. continues sending Maine’s sons and daughters into this longest war in American history with no clear mission, no end in sight, and not even a basic Congressional Declaration of War.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress (and Congress alone) with the power to make war on another nation.

But since World War II, Congress has been content to obfuscate accountability and defer decision making to the Executive Branch, which James Madison called “the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.”

Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the U.S. Constitution, known as the “Militia Clause,” permits Congress to call forth the National Guard into federal service “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”

In 1990, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that National Guard units could be deployed overseas for training exercises without the consent of a state’s governor.

The Justices wisely said nothing about active-duty combat deployments, knowing that such action only falls under Congress’ purview to declare war.

“Defend the Guard” would not prevent the National Guard from deploying to other states to offer assistance, or participating in training missions overseas, or going into federal service for the reasons explicitly written in the U.S. Constitution.

It's sole, narrowly defined purpose is to prevent the National Guard from being used in illegal wars and requiring that congressmen put their names on the dotted line before they ask our Maine soldiers to put their boots on the ground.

I ask the committee to vote Ought To Pass.