Kerry's Voting Record
Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 8:18:47 am PST
John Kerry isn’t just weak on national security; from the evidence of 30 years of voting, he’s opposed to it: Kerry’s Inner Dove. (Hat tip: Colt.)
When he won election to the Senate in 1984, Kerry said that the “issue of war and peace” remained his “passion.” As a first major foreign policy cause, he championed the “nuclear freeze.” Later Kerry battled Sen. Sam Nunn, a hawkish Democrat who chaired the Armed Services Committee, over the funding of research into missile defense, which Kerry wanted to slash.
The litany of weapons systems that Kerry opposed included conventional as well as nuclear equipment: the B-1 bomber, the B-2, the F-15, the F-14A, the F-14D, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air-defense cruiser and the Trident missile. And he sought to reduce procurement of the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile and the F-16 jet. Time and again, Kerry fought against what he called “the military-industrial corporate welfare complex that has relentlessly chewed up taxpayers’ dollars.”
Kerry was one of the Senate’s strongest critics of President Ronald Reagan’s policies of military resistance to Communist inroads in this hemisphere. When U.S. troops intervened in Grenada, Kerry denounced the action as “a bully’s show of force.” Kerry lent his name to Medical Aid for El Salvador, a political group that brought humanitarian aid to regions of that country held by Communist guerrillas. And he made himself one of the Senate’s most vigorous opponents of aiding the anti-Communist contras as a means of pressuring Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime. “I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do,” said Kerry. He and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) traveled to Managua to try to work their own peace deal with strongman Daniel Ortega and thus undercut U.S. policy. Kerry justified this by saying Reagan had failed “to create a climate of trust” with the Sandinistas.
Notice that Kerry voted against every single one of the most powerful weapons in our military arsenal, weapons that are indispensable in our present war.
But then, Kerry doesn’t seem to believe we’re in a war.
