On June 15, the Senate sent a bold message — Russian sanctions are here to stay.
However, a 98-2 bipartisan majority in the Senate has proven insufficient in overcoming the House’s partisan difficulties. And as congressmen anxiously await a House vote, the leadership of both parties cannot agree on where the difficulties lie.
The bill from the Senate called for “new sanctions against Moscow over its continued involvement in the wars in Ukraine and Syria and for its alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” and sought to “punish Tehran for ballistic missile tests and the engagements of the country’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps,” per the Washington Post.
But perhaps more intriguing than these new economic pressures is language that, again per the Washington Post, “included provisions codifying all existing sanctions against Russia and giving Congress the power to block the president if he tries to scale back existing ones.”
And while both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate urgently believe this bill should pass, the House has not shared their sense of immediacy. Nearly a month has passed and the bill yet to be brought to vote. And now a growing faction from both parties are beginning to suspect that GOP leadership may be intentionally delaying the bill.
Initially these delays were reported by CNN as “stalling the bill on the White House’s behalf so that Trump wouldn’t sign it into law ahead of the Putin meeting,” angering top Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who lamented the bill slipping into the July 4 recess saying to CNN “We wanted to send a message to Mr. Putin: If you interfere with our democratic institutions, you will be punished.”
But now that both the July 4 recess and the G20 meeting between President Trump and President Putin have passed, even prominent Republican House members are questioning why delays on the bill continue.
Politico reports that House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a Russian hawk fed up with the lack of legislative action on the Senate bill, may be willing to introduce his own bill in the House that implements Russian sanctions.
The authors note that “California Republican’s uneasiness underscores the growing anxiety among House GOP Russia hawks, who are concerned that the White House’s clandestine lobbying campaign to water down the bill could make them seem soft on Russia.”
The House GOP leadership, for their part, have taken to blaming the Democrats for the delays.
“House Republicans are prepared to send the Iran-Russia sanctions bill papers back, which will allow the Senate to automatically resend us a fixed bill, but House Democrats are blocking that and demanding their own changes to the bill,” a spokeswoman for Speaker Ryan said in a statement.
However, Politico notes that these delays arose after the GOP leadership removed provisions form the bill that any member could raise a vote to block the president’s tampering with Russian sanctions, and instead reserving this ability for Republican members.
Democrats believe that this amendment was an intentional poison for the bill, with a spokeswoman for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi stating that “Republicans could put the bipartisan Senate passed Russia sanctions bill on the president’s desk tomorrow, but instead they’re searching high and low for excuses to drag out the process [and] weaken the bill.”
And for every day Congress spends bickering over the passage of this bill, the White House gains another day to lobby against the bill’s provisions that take away Trump’s power to make changes to Russian sanctions.
Whether the White House is successful in preventing this measure remains to be seen. But as pressure is mounting from Congressional members across the political spectrum for these provisions to pass, it would appear only a matter of time, and political will, that Congress takes a stronger stance on both Russia and the White House.