The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is falling apart.
The historically bipartisan panel is slipping back into a state of paralysis after a five-month dispute that appeared resolved last week completely unraveled again late Tuesday night.
Committee members were slated to gather later this morning for their first markup since April. Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the panel’s top Republican, has for months refused to sign off on a committee-wide meeting to consider nominations and legislation until Democrats agree to add a House-passed ICC sanctions bill to the agenda.
Last week, Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.) relented, citing the massive backlog of State Department nominees, mostly ambassadorships, that resulted from the standstill.
But late Tuesday night, Democrats removed the ICC sanctions bill from the markup agenda. Republicans countered by withdrawing their consent for the business meeting to take place.
That means the panel won’t be able to hold a markup until November at the earliest, with the Senate set to begin a long recess after this week.
“The committee’s ability to do routine business — hearings and votes on 40 or so nominees, most of whom are long-serving career public servants — has been obstructed by Republican efforts to force partisan legislation onto the agenda,” said a Democratic committee aide.
The aide added: “This is a crisis, pure and simple.”
The decision to remove the ICC bill was made after Republicans filed amendments to the measure that “made it harder, not easier to pass,” according to the aide. Some of the amendments had nothing to do with the underlying legislation, which would sanction the International Criminal Court if it attempted to “investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Americans or our allies.”
Democrats interpreted this as a sign that Republicans were only interested in “scoring political points right before the election.”
Of course, Republicans see it differently. They’ve long said Democrats don’t want to debate the ICC bill because it divides their party.
And Republicans noted that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had promised a bipartisan negotiation on an ICC sanctions package, which never came to fruition. The House bill passed with modest Democratic support, too.
“If the majority wants to continue the long tradition of taking on difficult issues and have a debate, it would have permitted the committee to debate and vote on the ICC bill,” said an aide to a GOP member of the panel. “Next time they want to bemoan the lack of committee action on career State Department nominees, they should look in the mirror and remember this moment.”
So what happens now? It’s anybody’s guess. But things are getting worse, not better. Nominations are piling up, and at this rate, there might not be another Foreign Relations Committee markup this Congress.
