House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., accused the Obama administration of “tolerating our enemies” by reportedly working with House Democrats to delay a vote on legislation imposing new sanctions against Syrian leader Bashar Assad for war crimes against civilians.
“Reports of the Obama administration working to delay a vote on a bipartisan bill to sanction the Assad regime follow the now-familiar pattern of the president tolerating our enemies and neglecting our allies,” McCarthy said in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon.
House Republican and Democratic leaders were planning to bring up the measure this week, and it was expected to sail through passage with broad support, including from several liberal Democrats. But late last week, the Democratic leadership bowed to pressure from the White House and yanked their support for the bill, according to a report in the Washington Post.
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was the primary author of the bill, and co-sponsors included such liberal Democrats as Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.
The White House thought the vote on the bill was ill-timed, as the fragile cease-fire in Syria was already fraying. But the bill’s backers say it’s non-controversial and something that the Assad regime should have expected regardless of the cease-fire, which collapsed on Monday when a Russian bomb reportedly hit a humanitarian aid convoy.
“The Assad regime and its allies are indiscriminately killing on a breathtaking scale, and this administration has done nothing substantial to stop them,” McCarthy argued in his statement. “Given that the cease-fire agreement has essentially collapsed, I hope that the administration will allow congressional Democrats to move forward with this bill.
“This bill could give us real leverage against Assad, but the administration has failed to recognize that,” he added.
Pro-opposition Syrian activists in Washington, D.C., said Obama’s “weakness” in opposing the bill is only encouraging Assad’s brutal assaults on civilians.
“President Obama is terrified that a vote on a bipartisan bill to hold Assad accountable for war crimes will upset peace talks while Assad yesterday deliberately targeted a U.N. convoy and Russia is offensively accusing the U.S. of supporting [the Islamic State],” Mirna Barq, a Syria American Christian from Damascus, told the Washington Examiner.
Barq belongs to the Coalition for a Democratic Syria and serves as president of the Syrian American Council.
“How many more Syrians have to be killed until Congress lets the victims of Assad’s war crimes have a vote?” she asked. “The weakness of the White House only sends a strong signal to Assad to escalate the killing.”
Engel told the Post that he agreed with the White House that the delay was appropriate and that, although he is skeptical that the cease-fire will hold, it should be given a chance to succeed. He also said he would continue to try to get the sanctions bill to the House floor for a vote.
The sanctions bill, dubbed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protect Act, is named after a Syrian defector who has documented Assad’s mass torture and murder of civilians with 55,000 photos.
It would impose new sanctions on the Assad regime and its supporters, and aims to prompt investigations and ultimately prosecutions of war crimes in Syria, according to the Post. It would require the president to impose new sanctions on any entity engaging in business or finance with the Syrian government or its military or intelligence services, including Russia and Iran.
An agreement last week between the House GOP and Democratic leaders would have allowed the measure to come to the floor this week under suspension of the rules, a streamlined approach that still requires two-thirds support to approve. That deal broke down when the White House intervened and pressured Democrats to withdraw their support for it this week.
