Via the Washington Post this morning, we’re still pretty much where I said we were last week, but at least we have an expected date for a committee markup. The Senate is still trying to work out a bipartisan compromise between Senator Bob Menendez’s (D, NJ) weaker S. 1747 and Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) tougher S. 2144, rather than voting on the House bill that passed last week “with huge bipartisan support.”
While the House and Senate bills contain generally the same sanctions options, there are differences between them — key among them that a compromise Senate measure is likely to leave more decision-making authority in the president’s hands and carve out more humanitarian assistance protections than the House bill.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said in an interview while there was “nothing fundamentally wrong with the House bill,” he would like to tackle human rights in North Korea more comprehensively.
The House bill would only serve as a backup if the Senate can’t work out one outstanding issue between the its two measures, Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday.
“I’m 99 percent sure it will be a Senate bill,” Corker said, adding his committee will likely consider the measures during a Jan. 28 markup. [WaPo, Karoun Demirjian]
There is more pressure for the Senate to get its act together this time. Demirjian notes that in contrast with the House, which also passed a similar antecedent to its recent sanctions bill in the 113th Congress by a voice vote, the Senate “dropped the ball” on moving its own bill in the last Congress. It notes that “working through a separate bill may slow down the pace with which Congress responds to the latest nuclear provocation from Pyongyang.”
But Senate leaders stressed they have every intention of moving North Korea legislation quickly this month.
If the negotiations process falls apart, Corker said, “we still have the House-based text we could take up and certainly pass with a strong bipartisan majority.” [WaPo]
From what little we know here, it sounds like the negotiations are headed in the right direction.
Menendez said last week the compromise bill should feature “a mix of mandatory and discretionary sanctions” and added on Wednesday that he expected the final list would be a combination of the two.
If I’m guessing this right, the Senate is thinking of retaining the mandatory sanctions in Section 104(a) and making the sanctions in Section 104(c) discretionary, and perhaps even conforming that subsection to the text of Executive Order 13687. That would be a reasonable compromise that would keep the bill tough while preserving a structure that would be easy to amend and toughen in response to future provocations.
The bills also differ in what kinds of cybersecurity threats would be sanctioned, and emphasis put on North Korea’s minerals industry — a unique feature of Gardner’s bill.
The measures also approach human rights and humanitarian activities differently, with Menendez’s bill going the furthest to ensure that humanitarian aid and assistance receives special protection from enhanced sanctions, which is a key concern for some Senate Democrats. [WaPo]
Judging by some of the off-line discussions I’m having, the Senate really is working actively on this, with some of the most conservative and some of the most liberal senators taking leading roles. One issue I can confirm Senate staff are giving careful consideration is the shape of the humanitarian waivers and exemptions, such as those you can see in Section 207 of the House bill. That’s an important issue, deserving all the careful draftsmanship the world’s greatest deliberative body can muster.
From my vantage, this continues to be a case of a hawkish and mostly united Congress — yes, I really said “united Congress” — pitted against an administration that can’t decide what to do, and has decided to do nothing. For example, while Senator Gardner is criticizing the President for not mentioning North Korea in his SOTU speech, Gardner’s own toughness finds a serious competitor in this letter from Senator Ed Markey, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat, to the Secretary of State.
Here’s hoping that the final shape of the Senate’s bill is worth the wait.