What Happens to U.S. Foreign Policy with a Democrat majority House

T. Belman.  An American liberal Zionist Jew (self -described) wrote an article which I have posted below, which starts, “Netanyahu owns the result of going all-in with a racist and corrupt Donald Trump and an extremist GOP, turning support for Israel into a bitter partisan issue.”  Unbelieveable.

The Democratic majority’s greatest influence will be oversight – the ability to call hearings

Democrats will try to harden U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia, Russia and North Korea with their newly won majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, while maintaining the status quo on hot-button areas like China and Iran, congressional sources say. [THIS IS WAY OFF BASE.]

On Tuesday night, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives from Republicans for the first time since 2011. That means they can determine what legislation can be considered in the chamber and have a bigger role in setting spending policy and writing legislation, in their challenge to U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda.

But since they must still work with a Republican-controlled Senate to pass any bills, the Democratic majority’s greatest influence will be oversight, the ability to call hearings and, if necessary, subpoena witnesses, as they chair committees like Foreign Affairs, Armed Services and Intelligence.

ISRAEL

Chuck Schumer, the New York senator and minority leader, told Jewish Insider: “Senate Democrats are very strongly pro-Israel and will remain that way.”  [I DON’T BELIEVE THIS FOR A MOMENT.] Schumer was responding to criticism that a new wave of anti-Israel Democrats are poised to enter the Congress.

Ilhan Omar, who will be one of the two first Muslim-American women entering the Congress this fall, has had to reject accusations that a 2012 tweet accusing Israel of ‘evil doings’ amounts to anti-Semitism and she has repeatedly denounced Israel for apartheid.

Rashida Tlaib from Michigan, the other Muslim-American woman set to make history, has already had a political tussle over Israel since winning her Democratic primary for Congress. She lost the endorsement of J-Street for refusing to endorse the two-state solution.

However, little seems likely to change in the U.S.-Israel relationship. U.S. President Barack Obama was a staunch ally of Israel [BULLSHIT] and increased U.S. military aid to Israel during his time in office and was responsible for much of the funding that helped to create Israel’s Iron Dome missile shield.

SAUDI ARABIA

The furor over the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has added to lawmakers’ frustration with Saudi Arabia over civilian deaths in the war in Yemen and human rights.

A Democratic-led House would vote on legislation to block arms deals with Riyadh, [AND KILL ALL THOSE JOBS.  I DON’T THINK SO.] make it difficult to win congressional approval of a nuclear energy deal with the kingdom and take up a measure to stop U.S. aircraft refueling and other support for the campaign in Yemen.

RUSSIA

Democrats plan Russia-related investigations, such as a probe of business ties and conflicts of interest between Trump and Russia.

But from a policy perspective, a Democratic-led House would push to punish Russia for interference in U.S. elections and activities including its aggression in Ukraine and involvement in the Syrian civil war.

The House would push for more sanctions, including measures targeting new Russian sovereign debt. They would also try to pressure Trump to enact all of the sanctions in a sweeping bill he reluctantly signed into law in August 2017.

“Trump would have to accept policies that he is not so enthusiastic to accept,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former congressional aide and State Department official now at the Center for a New American Security.

Members of Congress have also vowed to push harder, using subpoena power if necessary, to obtain information about Trump’s summit last summer with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The White House has released few details about the meeting. [I DON’T SEE ANY OF THIS HAPPENING. TRUMP CAN VETO ANY LEGISLATION IF HE WANTS TO.]

NORTH KOREA

Democrats say they are determined to obtain more information about meetings by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, worried that Trump is so eager to make a “great deal” that he will give Kim too much. [THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT TRUMMP IS GIVING TOO MUCH LIKE OBAMA GAVE TOO MUCH TO IRAN.]

They plan to call administration officials to testify in public, and behind closed doors, about the status of talks. But they also will walk a fine line, because they do not want to be seen as interfering with diplomacy and efforts to prevent a nuclear war.

CHINA

Aides and outside experts do not expect that Democratic House control will mean significant changes in China policy. Democrats will hold more hearings, and demand more briefings, but criticism of Beijing has so far crossed party lines and that is not expected to change.

Prominent Democrats, such as Representative Adam Schiff, who is in line to chair the House Intelligence Committee, have joined Republicans backing measures to clamp down on China, like legislation treating ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd technology and phones as major cyber security threats.

Like Republicans, Democrats are divided on Trump’s trade war with China. Some party members see free trade as a generator of jobs, while others back tariffs to protect workers in industries such as steel and manufacturing.

IRAN

Democrats were infuriated by Trump’s withdrawal from the international nuclear deal with Iran that Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration reached in 2015. But there is little they can do to change the policy as long as Republicans occupy the White House.

Lawmakers also are wary of seeming too friendly to Iran, especially given hostility to Tehran by the government of Israel. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has worked increasingly closely with U.S. Republicans, strong ties to Israel remain a top priority for both parties.

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Opinion Benjamin Netanyahu Just Lost the U.S. Midterms

Netanyahu owns the result of going all-in with a racist and corrupt Donald Trump and an extremist GOP, turning support for Israel into a bitter partisan issue. But that Faustian bargain was only worth it as long as Trump and the GOP remained in complete power

Netanyahu and Trump embrace at the beginning of their White House meeting, Feb. 15, 2017.Evan Vucci/AP

For an American Jew like me, who counts himself among that endangered species known as the liberal Zionist, the political success of Benjamin Netanyahu has always evoked equal measures of disgust and begrudging regard. No matter how much I loath most of his policies, I cannot help but acknowledge his talent at finessing the fragmented landscape of Israel’s parliamentary system, which is an exotic exasperation to anyone habituated to the two-party menu of the United States.

In Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, however, Netanyahu was shackled to our binary Democrat and Republican politics – an embittered, existential polarization in the Trump era, what the political analyst Steve Schmidt has called “the Cold Civil War.”

And thanks to his full embrace of Donald Trump, with which the majority of the Israeli public has followed suit but the overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews reject, he’s now shackled to Trump’s midterm losses – and potential downfall.

In fact, Trump is merely the odious face of a Netanyahu policy that long predates the current president. Ever since he all but officially endorsed the Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 election campaign against Barak Obama, it has been plain that Netanyahu was prepared to write off roughly half of America, provided that the GOP could keep capturing that electoral prize.

American Jews of my ilk – not Orthodox, not Republican, which is to say at least three-quarters of the total – have tended to regard Netanyahu’s blatant tilt away from us as an arithmetic calculation that Israel can snub four or five million liberal and moderate American Jews (whom the prime minister believes in danger of  terminal assimilation anyway) in exchange for tens of millions of right-wing white evangelical Christians. In turn, he has gotten the wish list of an American embassy in Jerusalem, de facto approval of the occupation, and the abrogation of the Iran nuclear agreement.

The problem with that assessment, aside from the fact it may be totally wrong, is that it distorts the political landscape of America into a competition between a small Jewish population that skews center or left, and the far larger number of white evangelicals with the diehard reactionary beliefs that happen to conveniently include so-called Christian Zionism.

In a Knesset scheme of things, it might make sense to figure out which fringe party you could wangle into your coalition. But in the inevitable us-versus-them configuration of American elections, a voter has to choose between a Democrat and a Republican for each office, even in times far more temperate than these.

Support for Israel in Congress and the White House had been one of the rare bipartisan exceptions until Netanyahu went all-in with an increasingly extremist version of the Republican Party. Now he owns the predictable result, which is that Israel is a partisan issue here and is bound to become ever more of one.

As I have noted previously, because of Netanyahu’s strategy, Israel is now tarred with everything about Donald Trump – the racism, misogyny, homophobia, nativism, corruption, and Russian collusion. As long as Trump and his Republican Party remained in complete power, a cynic could say the bargain was worth it.

Then came the midterm elections. They did not result in the “blue wave” of a Democratic restoration that some polls have suggested and people like me had hoped. Thanks to Trump’s genius for demagoguery – specifically portraying a ragtag band of 3,500 Honduran migrants bound by foot for the U.S. border into a putative invasion – he motivated his bigoted base to turn out in droves.

Their groundswell staved off exciting Democratic challengers for the Senate in Texas (Beto O’Rourke) and governor in Florida and Georgia (Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams, respectively). The Trump hard-core also helped to oust ncumbent Democrat senators from Republican-leaning states (Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Joe Donnelly in Indiana).

Those losses, though, were only part of the story of the midterms. The Democrats captured at least 26 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them the majority in that chamber. They knocked out Republicans in hidebound conservative sections of Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as moderate suburbs along coasts.

Republicans lost the governor’s race even in reliably red Kansas. Though O’Rourke, Gillum, and Abrams fell short in their own races, they pushed up Democratic turn-out so much that the party captured down-ballot contests for seats in the House and state legislatures.

The shift in power in the House matters most of all. The majority party, now the Democrats, gets the majority of seats and the chairperson’s gavel on every committee. A number of those committees will set about investigating the financial corruption Trump and his family, as well as the Trump campaign’s collaboration with Russian meddling into the 2016 election.

With any luck, Trump will die the political death of a thousand cuts from those investigations and be voted out of office in 2020. Then all we will have to worry about is whether he will actually concede or hole up in the White House and call on the army and a bunch of white-nationalist militias to defend him. I am not kidding.

If Netanyahu and Israel played much of an overt role in the midterm elections, then those debates escaped my notice. Healthcare, immigration, the economy and gun control topped the polls.

Looking ahead, I do expect there to be a lot of convenient catastrophizing from Jerusalem about the election of two Muslim-American Democrats to the House, Rashida Tlaib from Michigan and Ihlan Omar from Minnesota. But the predictable attacks and insinuations against them will be just convenient diversions from the dilemma of Netanyahu’s making.

In tethering Israel to just one political party and one ideology in an America that is profoundly split between two, the prime minister has evidently never allowed for the turn of events indicated by the midterms: the realistic prospect that the political majority will swing back to Democrats and that the evangelical right will be outvoted by a burgeoning movement of multicultural progressives, including the vast majority of American Jews.

Maybe that moment of transition will come in 2020, or maybe in 2024. But it will come. The split verdict of the midterm elections, while hardly decisive, should at least qualify as a blaring alarm.

It warns about the consequence of making Israel and Zionism nothing but fetish objects for the most radical and repugnant presidency in American history, provided anyone cares to listen.

Samuel G. Freedman is the author of eight books, including Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry. Twitter: @SamuelGFreedman