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Tag: ileana ros lehtinen
Some In Congress Balk As White House Plows Ahead With Cuba Policy

Some In Congress Balk As White House Plows Ahead With Cuba Policy

By Jim Wyss, Miami Herald (TNS)

BOGOTA, Colombia — Even before President Barack Obama announced sweeping changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba on Wednesday, his congressional opponents were vowing to undermine any attempt at rapprochement.

With Republicans in control of the House and Senate next year, opposition to reforms could be stiff, but it’s unclear how much Congress can push back against the White House.

Congress does control the purse strings and might use its power to deny funding to build an eventual embassy in Havana, or withhold financing from sections of the State Department tasked with normalizing relations with the island.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), for one, said he would use his role as the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to block the reforms, calling them a “a terrible setback for the hopes of all oppressed people around the globe.”

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., went further and said Obama may have broken several laws by acting unilaterally, including the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (LIBERTAD) Act of 1996, the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Trading with the Enemy Act.

“The White House attempts to normalize relationships with Cuba without the approval of Congress may be in direct violation of Helms-Burton that specifically states that all political prisoners must be released and free and fair elections must be held before establishing a diplomatic relationship,” she said in a statement. “This misguided action by President Obama will embolden the Castro regime to continue its illicit activities, trample on fundamental freedoms, and disregard democratic principles.”

Senior administration officials insist that Obama was well within his rights to make the reforms via executive decree.

Along with seeking full diplomatic ties, the changes will expand the types of goods that can be exported to the island — including material for residential construction, agricultural machinery and much-needed telecommunications equipment. In addition, U.S. companies will be allowed to do business with Cuban companies not on the island; remittances to Cuba will be increased from $500 to $2,000 per quarter; and financial institutions will be allowed to set up branches in Cuba.

But there are still barriers in place. Despite increasing commercial ties, trade with state enterprises, for example, remains prohibited. And while there are 12 broad categories of people who can now legally visit the island, U.S. law prohibits general tourism.

“We are basically doing everything we can within the statutory limitations to facilitate travel to Cuba,” said a senior administration official who was speaking on background.

For the most part, Obama has gone about as far as he can before bumping into the restrictions imposed by the Helms-Burton embargo law, said Gary Clyde Hufbauer with the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the co-author of the book Economic Normalization with Cuba: A Roadmap for US Policymakers.

Obama’s actions would likely be limited to marginal changes, like further relaxing travel restrictions, or raising the $160 per-diem that business executives are restricted to on the island. He could also direct the Federal Aviation Administration to begin certifying Cuban panes to ease travel back and forth.

“But to be honest, he may be near the end of his string” on potential reforms, Hufbauer said.

“If Obama really wanted to be gutsy he could argue that Helms-Burton is an unconstitutional infringement on presidential power,” he said. “But that would be a poke in the eye to Congress.”

The Helms-Burton legal framework continues to be a roadblock for U.S.-Cuba relations, said Michael Shifter, the president of the Inter-American Dialogue.

“There continue to be limits of large scale trade and investment. But Obama has ample authority to bypass restrictions when it would serve U.S. interests,” he said in an email from Cuba. “It is reasonable to expect more trade, more communication and more cooperation between the two countries. Short of repealing the embargo legislation, if the U.S. decides to remove Cuba from the list of states that support terrorism that would also have important implications for more U.S. financing in Cuba.”

While Florida lawmakers are bound to fight to keep the embargo in place, they will increasingly see pressure from business and other moderate lawmakers, analysts said.

“The level of opposition among most Republicans towards the policy shift is probably not as defined as it once was as the perceived threat by Cuba toward the U.S. has faded,” the Eurasia Group, a U.S. analytical firm, wrote to its subscribers Wednesday. “But those GOP lawmakers representing the Cuban community will remain implacably opposed to any move to normalize relations with Cuba as long as the Castro brothers remain in power.”

Cuban leader Raul Castro acknowledged that Obama’s hands are tied. But on Wednesday, he asked the U.S. leader to keep using his executive powers to chisel away at the embargo.

“I call on the government of the United States to remove the obstacles that block or restrict the ties between our countries,” he said.

But Congress could do its own pushing back. Besides starving initiatives of funding, it could also simply complicate things. By reducing the number of people who approve visits to Cuba, it could create a bureaucratic backlog, Hufbauer said.

But in some ways the embargo may already be mortally wounded, said Peter Schechter the director of the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council.

“For all practical purposes what President Obama has done today is end 55 years of sanction policies,” he said. “We can say that we have arrived at the beginning of the end of the sanctions regime for Cuba.”

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Congressional Republicans Plan To Slash UN Funding

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a bill today that would cut American contributions to the United Nations and punish any UN organizations that go along with next month’s planned UN vote on Palestinian statehood. The bill would abolish the compulsory fees that the U.S. currently pays the UN in favor of voluntary contributions, which would vary depending on how the U.S. feels about the direction of UN policy. If the UN doesn’t get at least 80 percent of its overall funding from voluntary contributions, then the bill would require the U.S. to slash its contributions by 50 percent.

The bill would also freeze U.S. contributions to peacekeeping missions until Ros-Lehtinen’s reforms are enacted, and would withdraw the U.S. from UN Human Rights Council. It would also withhold U.S. funding to any UN entities which, in the words of Ros-Lehtinen’s spokesman, “upgrade the status of the Palestinian mission, in advance of the Palestinian Authority’s statehood push at the UN.”

Ros-Lehtinen clearly timed the introduction of her bill to coincide with the upcoming debate on Palestinian statehood. The chairwoman said in a statement that

“The Palestinian leadership’s current scheme to attain recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN without even recognizing Israel’s right to exist has been tried before, and it was stopped only when the U.S. made clear that it wouldn’t fund any UN entity that went along with it. … [M]y bill similarly seeks to stop this dangerous scheme in its tracks.”

How the bill will accomplish this goal is unclear. Ros-Lehtinen’s first problem is that the bill has almost no chance of becoming law. Peter Yeo, the vice president for public policy at the UN Initiative, told Foreign Policy,

“It’s an extremist bill, and as a result of that is has little chance of getting broad bipartisan support. … [Senate Foreign Relations Committee heads] John Kerry and Richard Lugar have been strong supporters of a sound relationship between the U.S. and the UN, and we’ll continue to have strong Senate and executive branch opposition to this initiative.”

Furthermore, the Obama administration has already come out in opposition to the bill, and if it somehow passed through both the House and the Senate, President Obama would almost surely veto it.

Even if it were to become law, Ros-Lehtinen’s bill would be unlikely to accomplish its goals. Rep. Howard Berman, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement that the bill would “undoubtedly weaken our influence at the UN and make it harder to counter Palestinian attempts to unilaterally declare statehood.”

It’s hard to argue with Berman’s point; if the U.S. pulls out of the Human Rights Council and slashes funding for humanitarian missions in desperate countries like Haiti and Sudan, our ability to claim moral leadership will be badly damaged.

Overall, the Obama administration has enjoyed a good relationship with the United Nations, as evidenced by the organization’s move to authorize military action against Libya. Jeffery Laurenti, a UN analyst at the Century Foundation, said in a blog post,

“After two years of the closest and most productive cooperation in decades at the UN between Washington and the rest of the international community, it is hard to understand why Republicans in the House of Representatives are determined to poison the well.”

The recent foreign policy successes of the Obama administration may have intensified Republicans’ determination to move in a different direction. A push back toward unilateralism would give the Republican Party an alternative to President Obama’s foreign policy, which they could present to voters. Perhaps that’s why, at a time when many analysts are declaring the dawn of a “new era” in U.S. foreign policy, Ros-Lehtinen and her Republican colleagues seem determined to bring us back to the days of John Bolton diplomacy.