Glimmers of Bipartisanship on Foreign Policy

Who says Congress can't get anything done during an election year? Granted, lawmakers may not be addressing the country's urgent fiscal challenges, but they do appear poised to further tighten the economic vise on Iran as punishment for the mullahs' continued intransigence on nuclear enrichment.

The European Union's oil embargo and United States sanctions barring transactions with the Central Bank of Iran have only been in force for a few weeks, but members on both sides of the aisles are already itching to go further. The House and Senate are now trying to hash out the final details of a consensus piece of sanctions legislation, based on bills the House passed in December and the Senate in May. New measures under consideration would effectively cut off Tehran's energy and financial sectors from the rest of the world.

Those involved in the current negotiations -- half a dozen or so offices in addition to the lead negotiators Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL -- are optimistic a compromise bill is going to be ready for a vote next week. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has signaled he's prepared to make floor time for it. Ros-Lehtinen has even suggested it could move by voice vote in the House, a sign of just how broad the support is in the chamber.

Congress may also succeed in passing legislation granting Russia permanent normalized trade relations in time for Moscow's formal accession to the World Trade Organization in August. Without it, U.S. companies cannot get preferential access to Russia's newly opened markets under the WTO framework. The legislation has the support of leading Republicans and Democrats in both chambers (CQ subscription required), but Moscow's surly behavior on the world stage in recent months -- its stance vis-a-vis Syria being the most glaring example -- hasn't won it any friends on Capitol Hill, and passage in both chambers is still something of a wild card.

A Tale of Two Treaties

Ratifying treaties is one of the few direct levers of influence Congress -- specifically the Senate -- has over U.S. foreign policy. So it's interesting to see how members have approached that duty in recent years.

Whereas 30 years ago controversy over treaties was the exception, now it seems to be the rule. One of the main reasons for that is the strong segment of the Republican party that is unabashedly skeptical of any international pact that could subject the United States to foreign standards or regulation. So even something like the Law of the Sea Treaty (CQ subscription required) -- a United Nations convention that has been ratified by more than 160 countries and has the backing of traditional GOP constituencies like the oil industry and the Chamber of Commerce -- is facing serious headwinds (CQ subscription required) in the current Congress.

Two-thirds of the Senate have to vote to approve ratification of a treaty for the U.S. to move forward with it, and 31 Republicans have already signaled their opposition to the Law of the Sea, which would regulate countries' and companies' use of the deep seas. Essentially, opponents do not like the prospect that U.S. would be accountable to an international panel for its deep sea exploration and navigation. Many of the same Republicans voted against ratification of the New START arms reduction treaty with Russia in 2010, though the Senate ultimately approved that pact by a narrow margin.

One treaty, however, looks poised to buck the trend of air-tight votes. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities -- which would raise international standards for the treatment of the disabled -- has a bipartisan group of senators backing it, from conservatives who have opposed most other treaties to liberal members of the Senate Democratic leadership. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on the treaty was a relatively innocuous affair and the committee has now scheduled a vote on Thursday July 19. It could actually win Senate approval by July 26, the disability advocates because it marks the 22nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That would be lightning quick by the standard of today's Congress.

UPDATE, 7/17:

Three more Republican senators announced their opposition to the treaty, pushing the total that have expressed public objections to 34 -- just enough to block ratification (CQ subscription required) should it come to a vote.

McGurked

President Obama's nominee to be the next ambassador to Iraq withdrew his name from consideration Monday afternoon, after it became clear that support for him had cratered (CQ subscription required) in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The New York Times has the letter,which alludes to the adultery scandal -- conveniently preserved on National Security Council emails -- that swept up Brett McGurk and his now wife (then mistress), a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

In the immediate aftermath, I saw some on Twitter comment that McGurk was a victim of the overly intense media scrutiny of political figures' personal lives. In general, I'd agree that the MSM obsession with political sex scandals borders on the pathological, exaggerating beyond all reasonable sense of scope and scale the import of any given incident.

In this particular case, however, I don't think that's the issue. McGurk's nomination MAY have survived had someone not leaked a trove of unfortunately worded emails online, but it was never going to be an easy road. As I reported at the beginning of the month (CQ subsciption required), a number of lawmakers had serious doubts about McGurk, both based on his policy choices and his qualifications.

Rumors about his personal life had also been floating around, but the publication of the emails only played into the notion, already embraced by some, that McGurk did not have the judgement or maturity or gravitas to head up the United States' biggest diplomatic footprint overseas. 

Ground May be Shifting on Syria in Congress

White House officials may be in agreement on the question of military intervention in Syria -- they're against it, for now -- but there is no such consensus on Capitol Hill.

The split between the hawks, led by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, and skeptics like Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, has been evident for months. But now some of those in the middle, who have mostly kept their heads down up to this point, are starting to stir. And in the wake of the Houla massacre over the weekend, they are suggesting that a more proactive U.S. stance may be necessary.

Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most prominent voice to publicly muse about future intervention in Syria, which he says will have to be led by Turkey. Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democratic moderate from Nebraska, also issued a release this week saying that unless Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad leaves power voluntarily (doubtful), "military intervention is inevitable.”

It will be interesting to see, when both chambers are back at work next week, whether this indicates the start of a groundswell amongst the plurality of members who have staid on the fence on Syria up until now.

Another Casualty of the Culture Wars

It's hard to find anyone who disagrees with the notion that modern day slavery or "human trafficking" is an awful practice, even on Capitol Hill, where members disagree about pretty much everything. That's why a law to help combat the practice has been such a novelty over the last decade -- every time it comes up for re-authorization, it sails through Congress with unanimous backing.

Not this year. In a piece I wrote for last week's CQ Weekly magazine, I look at how the bipartisan consensus that has supported the bill's passage in the past crumbled last fall thanks to a dust-up between Obama administration officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. For five years, the Bishops Conference had overseen a grant program to assist trafficking victims in the United States. HHS decided not to renew the grant in late September because the group refused to reimburse subcontractors for reproductive health services that conflicted with the Catholic faith -- i.e. birth control and abortion.

In the midst of all the election year politicking and posturing, the talk of wars on women and religion, it doesn't take much more than the mention of the a-word to get politicians twisted in knots. Suffice to say, House Republicans are now completely at odds with Senate Democrats, and even some Senate Republicans, over how to proceed on the bill. That does not bode well for its passage given all the other legislative issues competing for floor time.

Rubio Does Diplomacy

Freshman Sen. Marco Rubio has been carving out a niche in foreign policy since he joined the chamber last year (something I blogged about last fall). But the Florida Republican -- and a top GOP vice presidential contender -- hadn't done any high-profile overseas diplomacy until last weekend, when he made a trip to Cartagena, Colombia for the sixth annual Summit of the Americas, a gathering of the leaders of the Western Hemisphere.

The trip was natural enough from a policy standpoint for the senator -- a bilingual Cuban-American and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. But the politics of the visit are also unmistakeable, as I wrote about for Roll Call this week. Much of Rubio's cache as a potential VP pick for presumptive GOP presidential Mitt Romney stems from his appeal to Latino-American voters. But it turns out that outside of Florida and D.C., he is an unknown quantity to much of that constituency. Vice presidential nominees are also often looked to to bring national security and foreign affairs chops to the ticket, a particular plus in this case since Romney has focused on his business and management acumen.

Rubio smartly focused most of his media outreach in Cartagena to the Spanish-speaking outlets. So combined with the Secret Service prostitution scandal, which dominated the English-language news coverage out of the Summit, his trip flew almost entirely under the radar in Washington. But it demonstrates that, as much as he may deny it, he and his advisors are pursuing a savvy strategy to raise his profile and his gravitas within key political spheres, maybe for 2012, maybe beyond.

Afghanistan Unraveling

Things have gotten ugly in Afghanistan in the past week. The worst setback, by far, was the massacre of Afghan civilians by a rogue U.S. soldier, but new demands from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the Taliban's withdrawal from peace talks and a would-be-attack during Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's visit on Wednesday didn't make the picture any rosier.

The latest developments will only make it harder for the Obama administration to sell their long-term vision for Afghanistan on Capitol Hill. As a colleague and I reported in Congressional Quarterly's magazine on Monday, there is already serious resistance in Congress to several pillars of Obama's strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan as foreign troops withdraw. 

In interviews this week senators on both sides of the aisle expressly avoided  knee jerk reactions (CQ, subscription required) to the civilian killings, and there were few signals that anyone was changing their stance about the pace of troop withdrawals between now and 2014. But these events will inevitably reinforce security concerns for American advisers and diplomats and play into the argument that the international presence has worn out its welcome in Afghanistan. And that throws into doubt future Hill support -- and dollars -- for the counterterror/training/development footprint the administration has envisioned maintaining after security responsibility is shifted to the Afghans.