Rep. Joe Courtney from Connecticut's second congressional district was the only member of the delegation to vote in favor of arming and training Syrian rebels in the fight against the so-called Islamic State.
Two months after that vote, Courtney stood by his vote in September. He spoke to WNPR as part of a series of check-ins with Connecticut's House delegation.
Rep. Joe Courtney: I think events that have unfolded since that vote actually gives some validation to that decision. The sort of dynamic of supporting indigenous ground forces with American air power and some train and assist capability, I think, has shown some promising results in terms of stopping the momentum of ISIL, particularly if you look at the events that unfolded in Kobani.
For a while there, I think the international media had pretty much written off Kobani as a lost cause. Clearly, the dynamic has shifted now in a positive direction where they occupy a minority of the city. Now that new Peshmerga forces are coming in through Turkey, I think people are feeling much more confident about that whole situation.
WNPR's Diane Orson: Do you have any concerns about entering into an open-ended situation that could go on for a long time?
Well, I have been a strong supporter, in terms of having the U.S. Congress revisit the authorization of use of force. In fact, I wrote to Speaker [John] Boehner in September saying that we really need to not operate under a 2002 authorization of use of force, which is open-ended, and which, frankly, has absolutely no limitations in terms of scope of geography or capabilities that the U.S. could bring to the fight.
The president has said he would join in, in terms of modifying that. At this point, it doesn’t look very promising that we’re going to do that in the lame duck session, but we do not want to have a repeat of what happened in terms of the ground invasion in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and that’s where Congress can really put some pretty solid borders, in terms of the scope of operations, so we’re not in that position.
As the next session begins, is there a specific piece of legislation that you would like to see passed?
Last Congress, I was part of the group that got the Student Loan Certainty Act enacted, which prevented the doubling of interest rates for the Stafford student loan program. I was in the Oval Office when the president signed it, and he said very correctly that our work is not done.
The fact of the matter is that legislation like the Elizabeth Warren bill, which I’m a co-sponsor of -- to allow people with existing high student loan debt to write down the interest rate to three percent. As you know, some of the private student loans that people are carrying out there as high as ten and eleven percent, so that’s a huge priority for middle class families all across the country.
We also need to do a higher ed reauthorization bill, which will go further than just managing debt, and actually talk about trying to create new incentives and the higher ed environment to bring down the cost of college. This is not just about being nice to students and their families, which it obviously would be, but it’s frankly about whether we’re going to have a workforce for the future, and that the cost of college is really, I think, a long-term threat to innovation and growth in the U.S. economy, if we don’t start coming up with better policies.
