14 July, 2017
The Trump administration objected to provisions in the bill demanding that the president obtain Congress' approval before easing or lifting the sanctions, significantly narrowing the White House's ability to reconcile with Moscow.
"I'm a Russian Federation hawk", the house speaker told reporters in Washington.
New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, charged that adding the North Korean sanctions legislation was "silly" and said, "It's clear to me they are trying to kill" the Senate's Russian Federation sanctions bill. Some Democrats had accused Trump's fellow Republicans of stalling the sanctions package at least until after that meeting, to please the president. Democrats and some Republicans who backed the bill scoffed, saying the problem could have been quickly remedied. It also rests on a dispute over just how the act would get triggered to block Donald Trump from easing sanctions through his executive authority. But House members said it violated the constitutional requirement that all revenue-raising measures originate in the lower chamber.
They also objected to the fact that numerous sanctions are mandatory, meaning Trump could not waive them for national security reasons.
Hoyer said he doesn't believe the White House is supportive of the measure, but Democrats plan to introduce a companion bill to the Senate's in the House Wednesday.
The document is identical to the one that was supported by the Senate about a month ago with an absolute majority of votes.
"What happened with Donald Trump Jr. just underscores how Russia was operating", Cardin said, referring to the disclosure that the president's son met in June 2016 with someone identified as allegedly working with the Russian government having derogatory information on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. There is some hope that they can add an administrative fix to address these concerns without making legislative changes that would force yet another Senate vote on the bill. "We could have fixed it in five minutes", Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. The proposed sanctions involve a reduction of the maximum period for market financing of Russian banks to 14 days, and companies in the oil and gas sector - to 30 days. Trump could veto the bill, but coming on the heels of the revelation about the meeting between a Kremlin-linked attorney and two of Trump's family members during the campaign, a veto would be controversial, to say the least.
Marc Short, the White House legislative director, told reporters that the administration backs the new sanctions on Russian Federation and Iran, but it objects to a provision giving Congress a much greater say on sanctions.
White House spokesman Sarah Sanders said that a new version of the draft law on sanctions poses risks for the implementation of USA foreign policy.
"I don't think there's any doubt that the White House does not want this piece of legislation to pass", Hoyer told reporters Wednesday.
"I don't believe that having the president's party in a position to protect him from any oversight is good policy for our country and, in fact, could be unsafe to our country", Hoyer said.
