Congressional Republicans are looking for ways to press President Obama to do more against the Islamic State as the reach of its terror spreads and threatens to hit the United States.
House Republican leaders have taken up the president’s challenge for opponents of his strategy to come up with their own plan. A task force consisting of six committee chairmen — Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Homeland Security, Judiciary and Appropriations — is considering new measures designed to promote a tougher line against the extremists. Congressional sources said the process was still in the early stages, and the task force was still seeking input from members before deciding on what options to pursue.
“Two weeks ago it was France. Next week, it could be us,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “The White House needs to get serious about eliminating this terrorist threat.”
Right now, lawmakers are pushing legislation, which Obama has threatened to veto, that would impose more restrictions on a plan to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria in fiscal 2017. Congressional leaders fast-tracked the measure in response to evidence that the Islamic State was using the flow of hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Europe to hide terrorists.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said lawmakers would next look at the visa waiver program for citizens of other Western countries, such as Britain, and the threat from homegrown jihadis, including the thousands of Westerners who have gone to fight for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“We shouldn’t spend all of our concerns and time about refugees, there are bigger issues to deal with here,” Ryan, R-Wis., said.
There’s a growing consensus that the administration’s policies aren’t even enough to keep the group contained, let alone defeat it. In recent days, a number of former administration officials and other Democrats have joined Republican critics who have tried for month to get Obama to escalate U.S. actions against the extremists.
In November, two former defense secretaries, Leon Panetta and Chuck Hagel, have publicly criticized Obama’s approach, along with Michael Vickers, who until recently was a senior Pentagon official overseeing the fight for the administration. A number of retired military officers also have joined the conversation.
“We are playing a long game, when a more rapid and disruptive strategy is required,” Vickers wrote in Politico on Nov. 20.
But administration officials have indicated there would only be minor tweaks in their reliance on a combination of diplomacy and encouraging regional allies to take the initiative on the ground, backed by U.S. airpower, as a response to attacks in Paris on Nov. 13 that killed 130 people and a bomb that destroyed a Russian airliner over the Sinai on Halloween.
“It’s become clear that they are just running out the clock on this issue,” said Jessica Ashooh, a former adviser to the United Arab Emirates government on Syria who’s now at the Atlantic Council. “It just appears that the only way you would get action out of this president is if something terrible happened to the United States.”
Lawmakers already have sent Obama a requirement that his administration present Congress with a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the Islamic State by February in the annual defense policy bill, which the White House has said he would sign. And they plan to continue pushing for ideas that have bipartisan support, including sending arms directly to Iraqi Kurdish fighters and creating a “safe zone” for civilians in Syria to ease the refugee flow, which is being called the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.
“We’re going to move legislation through my committee, not just on arming the Kurds but also on the issue of a safe zone and we’re also going to try to push this administration to use airpower effectively and hit these ISIS targets,” Royce told Fox News on Nov. 21.
House lawmakers also are expected to reauthorize the Financial Services Committee’s task force on terrorism financing for another six months. Task force Chairman Mike Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., on Nov. 23 formally requested an extended mandate for the panel, which has been investigating ways of cutting off sources of funding for the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, they will continue to press administration officials on the issue. The Armed Services Committee has summoned Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford to a hearing Tuesday on Syria, the latest in a series of hearings at which lawmakers have harshly criticized the administration’s approach.
But since the Constitution gives the president authority over foreign policy, there’s a limit to what Congress can force Obama to do. And since he’s in the last year of his last term in office, he no longer has to face voters, which limits the public pressure they can place on him even though polls taken since the Paris attacks indicate Americans want a tougher approach to the Islamic State.
“I’m just having a real hard time politically seeing how this can be done,” Ashooh said. “There’s one thing standing in the way of a more constructive Syria policy, and that is the president.”
Ultimately, those who want more from the White House against the extremists will have to sell the idea to Americans, said Robert McFarlane, who was President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser.
“You can inspire confidence by having good leaders stand up and evoke some confidence in grassroots America,” he told the Washington Examiner.
