“The legislative branch wanted to make sure that what it’s passing into law is going to force action,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said after his panel approved the bill on Thursday. “When you have discretionary sanctions and you’ve got blanket waivers, it’s easy for an administration, Republican or Democrat, to waive those, and I think in this particular case, people felt strongly about that and wanted to make sure that [the sanctions] happened.”
The bill goes a step further than legislation the House passed earlier this month, which would require the president to impose sanctions on money launderers, weapons and luxury goods traders, and human rights abusers, but would leave it up to the administration to decide whether to impose sanctions for other financial transactions.
The Senate legislation would make sanctions for such prohibited financial transactions mandatory, allowing the president to waive them only on a case-by-case basis when it is in the national security or law enforcement interests of the United States. This marks a departure from the traditional way sanctions laws are structured. The president would still retain discretionary authority on whether to sanction those facilitating the transfer of the North Korean regime’s financial assets.
“This is a much more rigid regime on sanctions than we usually impose,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), one of two senators who drafted the Senate bill, arguing that the administration’s habit of “from time to time, add[ing] an additional entity” to the sanctions list “clearly isn’t working, otherwise we’d have effective change on the peninsula.”
Lawmakers scurried to move legislation after Pyongyang’s announcement earlier this month that it had conducted a fourth nuclear test, with the House passing its bill a week later. But the Senate waited to see if the committee could pull together a stronger proposal with more stringent measures against human rights violators, cyber attackers and raw materials traders whose commerce provides a significant amount of funding for the North Korean regime.
The push for taking a tougher stand with North Korea comes in the wake of a particularly tense period between lawmakers and the administration concerning sanctions against Iran. Lawmakers in both parties shared frustrations that the Obama administration was not moving quickly enough to punish Iran for conducting ballistic missile tests in advance of the implementation of the nuclear pact with Tehran. Many of those lawmakers are now preparing new, non-nuclear sanctions proposals against Iran that will be unveiled in the weeks ahead.
Gardner and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), both wrote North Korea sanctions bills last year and have been working for the last two weeks to combine their efforts into a single proffer – a deal they struck on Wednesday. In terms of the mandatory sanctions the administration would be forced to impose, the compromise product reflects the nature of Gardner’s bill more, but is slightly more stringent than either senator’s initial draft.
Menendez said he was comfortable to “provide certain areas greater absolutism” to make sure “there are sanctions that will be enforced, versus at the end of the day having a lot of discretion that never gets implemented.”
“The flexibility exists” through the waivers, Menendez added, arguing the case-by-case authority should placate any fears from the administration or South Korea that the Senate bill is too stiff. He also stressed that the Senate’s bill goes further than the House measure to ensure adequate exceptions for humanitarian aid for the North Korean people.
That combination appears to have satisfied Menendez’s fellow Democrats as well.
“In North Korea we’re not only going to speak as a united voice, we’re going to bring the House and the Senate together,” said committee ranking member Ben Cardin (D-Md.). Such support, he added, would “make it clear we won’t tolerate the type of activities that are taking place in North Korea.”
Cardin called the bill a “corrective action” against the erosion of harsh measures against North Korea that many lawmakers believe were eased in error. A decade ago, harsh financial sanctions that crippled a key institution that handled transactions for the regime helped drive North Korea to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. But some of those measures were ratcheted back during the negotiations, which were ultimately unsuccessful.
Since then, the Treasury Department has issued some new sanctions – but the Senate bill would intensify those efforts.
Corker said that swift passage of the bill would not preclude working through the United Nations Security Council to take additional measures against North Korea. This week, China, widely accepted as North Korea’s most vital sponsor nation, agreed to work with the United States on a U.N. resolution denouncing Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, but the two countries are still bitterly divided over what kind of additional punitive measures should be pursued.
The Senate’s bill will come to a floor vote the week after next, Corker said, and it is expected to pass.
It’s unclear whether the House will accept the Senate’s proposal, but House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) praised the committee for moving legislation, and supports the changes that were made.
“Now is not the time to stand by while this regime works to build an arsenal capable of hitting the United States,” he said in a statement.