Author: The Intercept

House Republicans enacted new rules for the 118th Congress on Monday that preserve the traditional right of rank-and-file members of Congress to bypass House leadership and put legislation on the floor directly if they obtain the signatures of a majority of the chamber. This opens a handful of legislative opportunities for Democrats, despite Republican ideological cohesion.

The maneuver, known as a discharge petition, was famously deployed by President Lyndon Johnson and his House allies to pressure reluctant opponents of civil rights to allow a vote for the Civil Rights Act on the floor. Under standard rules, the majority leader sets the floor schedule, in collaboration with the House Rules Committee, but a discharge petition can automatically pull a bill from committee and move it to the floor. Once the logjam was broken, it passed with significant support.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., deployed a discharge petition in the last Congress to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to move forward with a ban on congressional stock trading. Pelosi smothered the move by publicly agreeing to hold a vote, but then sabotaged negotiations.

With Democrats holding 213 seats in the 118th Congress, that leaves them five votes short of the number needed to bring a bill to the floor. For most legislation, five votes is far too high a hurdle to clear. It is exceedingly unlikely, for instance, that Democrats could find five Republicans to sign on to a discharge petition that created a vote on codifying Roe v. Wade, though there may be a small number of Republicans put in a difficult spot at home if they resisted signing.

A discharge petition to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling, on the other hand, could avert a financial crisis threatened by Freedom Caucus members who opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the speakership. In exchange for their votes, Freedom Caucus members won a commitment that McCarthy would hold U.S. debt payments hostage in exchange for significant spending cuts across the board. But if Democrats could find five Republicans unwilling to risk default, which would spark a global financial crisis, a discharge petition would give those Republicans a route around their own leadership.

First-term Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., said that he saw real opportunities for bipartisanship when it comes to antitrust policy, and a discharge petition could get around McCarthy’s support for concentrated corporate power. “I think there’s some interest on their side in doing some of this. There certainly is on ours. If we can get the numbers, fine, we’ll do it, I’ll be part of that,” he said.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said that a similar dynamic might be at play when it comes to immigration — “the desperation on the border,” as he put it — and the fentanyl crisis, if a handful of Republicans in blue districts feel pressure to get something done. “How can you not hear that and give it a fair opportunity,” he said. “If there’s common-sense, middle-ground, enforcement-slash-humanitarian, how can you turn that one down?”

And, of course, the fate of Republican Rep. George Santos of Long Island remains unclear. Santos is currently one of 18 Republicans serving in a district that voted for Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election. If Santos resigns or is booted from office, the question of codifying Roe in the resulting special election would be more salient with an active discharge petition underway, as it would move Democrats one vote closer to a majority.

In November, following the midterm elections, Ocasio-Cortez backed the idea of a discharge petition on abortion rights, though was concerned that Republicans might strip the discharge petition from the rules in the upcoming term. Their opportunity to do so quietly came and went on Monday. Any effort to change the rules in the middle of the term in response to a petition with momentum would at minimum attract national attention.

“Discharge petition is an excellent vehicle,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the interview. “Using rules is going to be quite important. I know that that’s going to be subject to negotiation within the Republican caucus as well. This is something that they’ve already started to use as a lever. … They are in a much weaker position as a party, which means they have more to concede — not us. And we can stand in that confidence, in that power a little bit more.”

David Segal, head of the group Demand Progress, which often works with both Democrats and Republicans on populist issues, said the motion to discharge opened up opportunities to push legislation opposed by party leadership. “Discharge petitions can be used to a variety of useful aims — from forcing members to take stances on popular issues, to potentially forcing votes on matters of important substance where there’s cross-partisan esteem, like antimonopoly policy, that could actually pass,” he said.

Democrats would have to move fairly quickly, however, to avert a financial crisis. First, a bill would have to be introduced and referred to committee, according to House rules and precedents. Then 30 legislative days would need to expire. Once 218 signatures are collected, another seven legislative days need to pass, at which point the motion would come to the floor on the second or fourth Monday after those seven legislative days are up. A legislative day is one in which the House is in session and then adjourns. A motion to discharge filed in February or March ought to be ripe by summer. The Treasury Department has not put a precise date at which default will occur, but the estimate is summer.

Using a discharge petition to avert default could, however, become a moot issue. Constitutional scholars have argued that the debt ceiling itself is unconstitutional: If Congress appropriates money, the executive is required to spend that money, not default because of a lack of borrowing authority when other avenues to fulfill the appropriations exist.

Last week Israel inaugurated the most right-wing government in its history, with the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the helm once again. Avner Gvaryahu of the group Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies of Israeli soldiers about their experiences in the occupied territories, joins Ryan Grim to discuss his country’s latest political turn.

Transcript coming soon.

When Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., called for a vote on a war powers resolution that would block U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen, the Biden administration immediately pushed back. The resolution, the White House warned, would upset diplomatic efforts and bring about the war it was trying to end.

“The Administration strongly opposes the Yemen War Powers Resolution on a number of grounds, but the bottom line is that this resolution is unnecessary and would greatly complicate the intense and ongoing diplomacy to truly bring an end to the conflict,” read White House talking points circulated privately. “In 2019, diplomacy was absent and the war was raging. That is not the case now. Thanks to our diplomacy which remains ongoing and delicate, the violence over nearly nine months has effectively stopped.”

The White House’s claims that its diplomacy is working, however, are undercut by its own political moves and the reality on the ground. President Joe Biden’s envoy for the conflict has consistently sided with the Saudi coalition against the Houthi movement that controls much of the country. And though a ceasefire during the spring and summer provided a respite in civilian casualties due to bombings, the ongoing Saudi blockade and economic warfare against Yemenis perpetuates the humanitarian crisis in the country — which the United Nations has deemed the worst in the world.

Without taking an even-handed approach to the conflict in search of a political solution and the mitigation of the humanitarian crisis, the Biden administration’s machinations can hardly be considered good-faith efforts at diplomacy, critics of U.S. policy in the conflict said.

“There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever,” Jamal Benomar, the U.N. special envoy for Yemen until 2015, told The Intercept. “There’s been no political process, no negotiations, or even a prospect of them. So an all-out war can resume at any time.”

The divisions in Yemen — with the Saudi coalition controlling southern oil fields and ports, and the Houthi-led government controlling territory in the north that houses some 80 percent of the country’s 30 million residents — are only growing more entrenched. Instead of asking concessions of its allies in the Saudi coalition, the administration’s one-sidedness has contributed to the breakdown of diplomacy.

Though violence has not returned to earlier levels since the expiration of the ceasefire in October, fighting continues along some of the war’s frontlines. The Houthis have warned that their restraint won’t last long amid the current impasse and continued blockade of fuel imports; if the embargo is not eased, they said, they will reciprocally blockade a nearby waterway crucial to the global oil markets. The situation is only growing more explosive.

“There’s been a lull in the fighting, but since there was no concerted effort to move the political process forward, the lull is a temporary one and all sides are preparing for the worst,” said Benomar. “The situation is extremely fragile because Yemen has fragmented now and you have different areas of Yemen under the control of different warlords.”

Truce

The largely diplomatic push cited by the White House in opposing the Sanders war powers resolution — a so-far ineffective push that gives Saudi Arabia room to maneuver — follows a pattern it has held since early in the administration, when Biden pledged to work toward ending “offensive operations” to the Yemen war, and Saudi Arabia engaged in its most aggressive bombing campaign under the rubric of “defensive operations.”

Under such conditions, progress toward a treaty has remained elusive. While the Houthi movement has steadily gained territory — and political support in the country — the Saudi-backed government and other allied militia groups maintained control of oil-rich areas and ports in the south, enabling the punishing blockade. Biden balked at calls to pressure Saudi into easing the blockade when it sparked the worst fuel crisis in Yemeni history. Instead, when administration officials have commented, they have avoided naming the Saudis, calling instead on “all parties” to allow unhindered import of fuel.

As the blockade continued and the fuel crisis worsened, the Houthis attacked the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in late January 2022 in two separate attacks, with one reaching a U.S. military base. In March, the Houthis targeted a storage site belonging to the Saudi national oil company, marking the second boldest attack against Saudi oil facilities. Instead of convincing the Saudis to deescalate, the Biden administration pledged to defend Riyadh and Abu Dhabi against what they’ve called the “terrorist” attacks.

Yet the threat to the global oil supply was becoming clear, a risk the White House was uninterested in running amid both a midterm election and a war between Russia and Ukraine. A week after the attack on Saudi’s oil infrastructure, the United Nations, backed by the U.S., managed to have all parties agree on a truce that would allow for talks on a settlement to the yearslong conflict. “The Saudis accepted the truce after belatedly realizing that they were losing in an expensive quagmire,” said Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA analyst and Brookings Institution senior fellow, in an email. “Biden’s team helped get them to that point along with a lot of help from the UN and Oman.”

The two-month truce allowed for a halt to all Saudi airstrikes and ground fighting and an ease on fuel imports to north Yemen, in return for a halt to Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia.

No Renewal

The ceasefire largely held up and kept getting renewed until October 2, when the Houthi government refused to renew it again.

The Houthi government laid blame with Riyadh and the U.S. for avoiding the issue most important to the Houthi-led coalition: monthly salary payments of the state employees. Since 2016, the Saudi-backed government relocated the Central Bank of Yemen to territory it controls, accusing the Houthi government of diverting the bank’s funds to the war effort, a charge international observers and aid groups found baseless. The Saudi-backed government promised to keep the bank’s policy of paying all public servants, estimated at 1 million employees who support around 10 million others, but it broke its word, denying millions of Yemenis their only source of income.

The Houthi-led coalition put the salary payment issue as a condition to renew the deal, but the Saudis agreed only on paying workers in the health and educational sectors. The Houthis maintained that the revenues from oil exports in areas under the Saudi-backed government, which would account for nearly 70 percent of Yemen’s budget, should be allocated for the pay of all public servants. No Biden-led diplomacy — intense, delicate, ongoing, or otherwise — could persuade the Saudis to stop diverting Yemeni public-servant money back to Riyadh.

Little progress has been made on the question of paying public servants. The U.N. Security Council, Britain, the European Union, and the U.S. called the Houthi government demand to pay all public servants “unrealistic” and “maximalist.” During a congressional hearing in December, Biden’s Yemen envoy Tim Lenderking blamed the Houthi government for the current impasse, slamming “the last-minute Houthi demand that the Yemeni Government divert its limited oil export revenues to pay the salaries of active Houthi combatants.”

What the U.S. deemed unrealistic has in fact been a demand of Democrats on Capitol Hill. What Sanaa demanded as a condition to renew the deal wasn’t impossible or even unrealistic. A group of 16 senators — along with many aid groups — called on Biden in May 2021 to end the Saudi blockade. While the Biden administration angled to keep the blockade as leverage in negotiations, the senators said the embargo “must end today and be decoupled from ongoing negotiations.”

For critics, the Biden administration’s stance — considering the payments to Yemeni public servants too great a cost for establishing a new ceasefire — isn’t a serious approach to ending the war.

“These demands benefit ordinary Yemeni workers, not the Sana’a government itself,” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, referring to the Houthi government in the capital of Sana’a. “What’s ‘unrealistic’ and even cruel, however, is to continue denying millions of public servants their salaries for multiple years and to derail ceasefire negotiations because of a humanitarian, not a political or military, demand.”

Diplomacy to Nowhere

The relative calm in fighting and a halt to bombing witnessed since April has been rare. Its impact on the most vulnerable, however, has been small. Much of the Yemeni suffering has been caused by the blockade and other economic warfare tactics, not the bullets and bombs.

The status quo leaves the Houthis little incentive to maintain a truce that delivers misery to the population it governs without any serious concessions around the blockade or payments to public-service employee payments. In return, the Houthi government has offered to cease its bombings of Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners. Saudi, emboldened by White House support, agreed on only easing restrictions on fuel imports.

Late last month, Omani negotiators were back in northern Yemen, urging the Houthis to sit down with the Saudis to discuss both issues. Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the Houthi movement’s leader and the one calling the shots, rejected the offer as another Saudi bid to evade addressing the economic crisis first, which he and his aides stressed should be decoupled from any other issues being negotiated. The Houthi message was simple, according to a source briefed on the talks: Pay the salaries of all public servants, lift the blockade on the northern port of Hodeidah and Sanaa airport, and then the parties can sit together to negotiate other terms.

The Saudis and the Emirates, however, seem unlikely to budge. So far, they have only granted concessions in the face of violence directed at Abu Dhabi and at Saudi oil fields, not through Biden-led negotiations.

That may be the dynamic at the heart of the White House’s opposition to the Sanders war powers resolution: Without U.S. support for its warplanes, the Saudis would be effectively grounded, perhaps emboldening the Houthis, who are poised to relaunch strikes and send global oil markets spinning to win an end to the blockade. So far, Houthi attacks intended as warnings have dissuaded tanker captains from offloading millions of barrels of crude oil that would have otherwise benefited the Saudi-backed government.

Facing the reality of the Houthis escalating their attacks, the Biden administration could dig in and refuse to meet reasonable Houthi demands while fending off congressional opposition to the war. Or the White House could pressure the Saudis into a genuine end to the war. In fighting the Sanders resolution, the White House has chosen to dig in. The Biden administration diplomacy is “ongoing,” but it’s not clear it’s going anywhere — making a resurgence of violence now seem inevitable.