Senators Graham, Menendez introduce companion to N. Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act

Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC) and Robert Menendez (D, NJ) introduced the bill, numbered S. 1747, last night. I haven’t had a chance to read the full text yet, but from my initial read, it looks similar to S. 3012, which Senator Menendez introduced in the 113th Congress.

Like S. 3012, S. 1747 makes the designations in Section 104(a) discretionary, rather than mandatory. The problem with that approach is that so far, President Obama has exercised his discretion to sanction North Korea as little as possible. The State Department has been patently dishonest in its refusal to hold North Korea accountable for its terrorist threats against Americans, to say nothing of its terrorist attacks against human rights activists and dissidents in exile.

Also like S. 3012, S. 1747 retains key provisions to fund the enforcement of the legislation in a time of shrinking budgets, and to fund humanitarian and human rights promotion programs, using assets forfeited from those who violate the prohibitions in section 104. That language was stripped out of the current House version, probably due to inter-committee jurisdictional drag. If only for keeping that important language in the conversation, S. 1747 is a welcome opening bid from the Senate.

Overall, S. 1747 is an imperfect but a good bill, and an important, bipartisan step toward putting a sanctions enforcement bill on the President’s desk this year. Like Senator Gardner’s S. Res. 180, S. 1747 sends a clear message to the President, urging him to abandon the old, failed approach of North Korean exceptionalism–of refusing to hold North Korea accountable for its threats, attacks, crimes, and atrocities lest we spoil a mood that exists only in the collective imagination of Foggy Bottom.

I wouldn’t assume that S. 1747 is the last bill we’ll see in the Senate before the August recess, either, despite Congress’s present preoccupation with Iran. Senator Corker (R, TN), the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, hasn’t spoken yet.

In the end, I’m confident that Congress will merge what’s best about both bills in the Conference Committee, hopefully this fall. Unless the President vetoes the bill, at great political cost to himself, that bill would re-shape North Korea policy around a two-track policy of sanctioning the regime in Pyongyang, and engaging the North Korean people. If diplomacy has any prospect of success–a prospect that now rests on the fragile reed of Kim Jong Un’s temperament–it lies in an approach that gives our diplomats enough leverage to win concessions to improve human security for the North Korean people, for the region, and for us.