Dems & Republicans join forces to support North Korea sanctions legislation

When it comes to North Korea policy, Washington’s most influential lobbyist has never been to Washington. He’s in his early 30s, never finished high school, chain smokes, likes to ski, loves the NBA and , favors dark suits and mushroom haircuts, has an explosive temper and a small nuclear arsenal, and weighs as much as a village full of his malnourished subjects.

Tuesday’s nuke test may have come just in time for Congress to act before dispersing for a long election year. Now, a sanctions bill that had stalled for months is moving swiftly to the House floor, and Roll Call and Foreign Policy are quoting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) as saying that her party will support the legislation, “virtually guaranteeing” its passage “as early as next week.”

[The leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: Chairman Ed Royce (R, CA) and Ranking Member Elliot Engel (D, NY)]

Foreign Policy says the bill will be “based on” the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act (which, in full disclosure, I helped write):

An aide for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Foreign Policy the legislation would be based on the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, a bill that passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee last year. The measure authorizes sanctions against banks facilitating the country’s nuclear program and the freezing of U.S. assets linked to North Korean “proliferation, smuggling, money laundering, and human rights abuses.” [Foreign Policy]

I won’t deny that the words “based on” concern me just a little, but I expect relatively few changes to the House bill — there just isn’t time for extensive ones. Whatever the changes, I just hope they aren’t harmful to the key provisions.*

The House bill is “ready to go” and could receive a vote the week of Jan. 11, Pelosi said. Because the bill has strong bipartisan support, she said it may be voted under an expedited procedure known as suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage. Speaker Paul D. Ryan confirmed the House will vote on North Korea sanctions, but deferred details on the schedule to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. [Roll Call]

In the Senate, where arcane rules make it difficult to move a bill without unanimous consent, things are less settled. There are two bills pending ”” Senator Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) strong S. 2144, and Senator Menendez’s substantively weaker S. 1747, which is largely redundant with an Executive Order President Obama signed a year ago, after the Sony cyberterrorist attack, but has hardly used. Unlike S. 2144, S. 1747 lacks mandatory sanctions, and leaves all the discretion to the President. 

[Senators Ron Johnson, Marco Rubio, James Risch, and Chairman Bob Corker. Via]

Unfortunately, the President’s failure to respond to the Sony cyberattack last year means that he doesn’t need more discretion, he needs less of it. Kim Jong-un may not know much about Congress, but he obviously has this President figured out.

While the final form of a Senate bill remains uncertain, the Senate’s mood is on open display. Marco Rubio (R, FL), a co-sponsor of S. 2144, is calling for North Korea to be put back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.** But of course, only a few lonely cranks ”” and three federal District Court judges, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and pretty much everyone of consequence in Congress ”” believe the evidence would support that.

“We have to do everything we can to ensure that they have less money to spend on these sorts of programs. So that’s why a state sponsor of terror, they should be returned to that list,” Rubio said in an interview with Fox Business Network. “They were once on that list. They were removed from that list as a concession. They need to be put back on,” he said. Rubio also called for measures to “go after the assets” overseas of the North’s leadership. [Yonhap]

Senator James Risch (R-ID), also a co-sponsor of S. 2144, told CNN, “I think that what is going to happen is, there are going to be some banking sanctions that they can turn the screw a little tighter on with some of the banks that they are doing business with in Asia. I have no doubt that that’s going to be looked at.” 

As Yonhap accurately divines, what Risch is calling for is a return to the strategy used against Banco Delta Asia in 2005, which “almost cut off the North from the international financial system.”

The blacklisting of Banco Delta Asia not only froze North Korean money in the bank but also scared away other financial institutions from dealing with Pyongyang for fear they would also be blacklisted. The measure is considered the most effective U.S. sanction yet on the North. [Yonhap]

Senator Kelly Ayotte, a moderate Republican from New Hampshire, called on the administration to “impose the toughest and broadest possible sanctions against North Korea and those who aid the regime’s illicit activities,” and also called the President’s North Korea policy a failure.

Senate Democrats are piling on, too.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called on Congress to pass new sanctions legislation in the wake of the test. Menendez introduced legislation last year with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) pushing the administration for tougher sanctions against North Korea and its supporters.

Cardin and Menendez both said, separately, that the Security Council should impose its own penalties on North Korea. “Moreover, given North Korea’s actions, the United States and our allies must also take additional steps to combine effective sanctions with appropriate countermeasures,” Cardin added. [The Hill]

On Wednesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers, including the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Intelligence Committee, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Adam Schiff of California, pushed for punitive sanctions.

“I intend to work with my colleagues in the Senate on legislation to impose additional sanctions on North Korea and would also urge additional sanctions by the United Nations Security Council,” said Cardin in a statement. [Foreign Policy]

Senate staffers are probably debating which version of the bill they’ll ultimately pass out of the Foreign Relations Committee. Crucially, we still don’t know which version Chairman Bob Corker (R, TN) will support. The Hill quotes Corker as promising to work with Cardin, Menendez, and Gardner to “bring further pressure to bear” on the North Korean government. He might introduce his own version, or even “simply take up the House version of the bill this time around.”

This being an election year, the presidential candidates are also criticizing the President’s policy and calling for more sanctions. That means almost all of the Republicans — even Rand Paul — but not only the Republicans.

“The United States and our partners, including the U.N. Security Council, need to immediately impose additional sanctions against North Korea,” Clinton said. [Foreign Policy]

As I so often do, I agree with what Mrs. Clinton says on foreign policy. If only I could forget that she was Secretary of State for four years. If only she hadn’t coined that awful term, “strategic patience,” which still makes the State Department people wince. The Republicans will want to hang this albatross around her neck. They’d be crazy not to. Ted Cruz is already hanging it around her husband’s neck. That’s why foreign policy would have been an important issue in this election, even if the entire world didn’t seem to be collapsing into anarchy.

It’s hard to find anyone who approves of how the President has handled North Korea today. Conservatives call him weak, and his “traditional supporters” have criticized him “for not pushing harder for direct multilateral talks with North Korea and other regional partners.” Foreign Policy reports a “rare convergence of criticism” that “the size and sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear program has increased” during his presidency. The Washington Post‘s David Nakamura accuses the administration of dropping the ball and outsourcing the problem to the Chinese.

So far, so good, but then, Nakamura’s sources criticize the President for not trying hard enough to get a deal, which isn’t quite fair. As The Wall Street Journal told us yesterday, “U.S. officials say they have repeatedly tried to engage North Korea in dialogue about its nuclear program in recent months, but Pyongyang hasn’t responded to their advances.” It sounds self-serving, but the record supports that contention. Besides which, the harder American presidents try to “engage” North Korea, the worse their results tend to be.

In this climate, all the administration can really do is shift the focus to its push for tougher sanctions at the U.N. It needs a win in New York to make up for what looks like a general rout of its North Korea (non-) policy in Washington. The administration will probably announce new bilateral sanctions under existing executive orders to preempt some of the momentum in Congress, but I doubt that will appease Congress now. The administration can forget about any new diplomatic initiatives. Its goal now is to avoid a greater crisis, and to keep North Korea from sapping its credibility on other foreign policy issues.

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* For more information on how a North Korea sanctions bill would work, why it would work, why more sanctions are needed, how it could work despite Chinese obstructionism, and how similar strategies have worked against North Korea before, here are those answers. For why I care and so should you, start here, and then move to this.

** President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves.

*** Yes, I changed the post title.