Congress gets a rude awakening on Saudi Arabia

Congress can often be a slow, cumbersome train where even the most common-sense proposals can get stuck in the machinery of bureaucracy and politics. In far too many cases, it takes a foreign policy or domestic crisis to jolt members of Congress out of their complacency.

The brutal, state-sanctioned assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a crime the CIA concluded was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is one of those seminal events. Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have come together in rare bipartisanship to not only denounce the assassination, but to urge the Trump administration to take punitive action against the Saudi government in response.