https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/yemen-saudi-war-house-resolution-democrats©
12.13.2018
The Yemen Vote Is a New Low for the
Democratic Party
House Republicans voted yesterday
to keep the monstrous war in Yemen going. But they couldn’t have succeeded
without the help of several Democrats.
Sadam
Khadam Mahdi, 27, lies on a bed in a field hospital on September 22, 2018 in Al
Khawkhah, Yemen. Andrew Renneisen / Getty
Why
are people disillusioned with politics?
There
are, of course, many answers to that question. But if you only need one, look no
further than yesterday’s vote to keep the US government fueling the genocidal war in Yemen.
Paul
Ryan and House Republicans managed to pass a bill blocking Congress from ending
US involvement in Yemen for the rest of the year. They did so by inserting a
provision into the 2018 farm bill rule — that is, not even the
farm bill itself, but simply the language that establishes how the legislation
will be debated and voted on — that effectively bars the House from taking up
any measure that halts the war for the rest of this Congress.
This
is as close to unambiguous evil as you’re likely to find in the real world,
which is saying something considering we’re talking about a party steadfastly devoted to ensuring the extinction of humans on Earth
through environmental destruction. There’s no set of voters who are clamoring
for the continuation of Saudi war crimes in Yemen, particularly given that both
the war and Saudi Arabia itself have become markedly unpopular since the murder
of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, so much so that
even Lindsey Graham — Lindsey Graham! — voted in November to advance a
resolution ending US involvement in the war.
This
latest move was clearly a step too far for even some in the GOP, because a
small fraction of House Republicans (eighteen of them) voted against the
measure, which would have ordinarily sailed through with little controversy,
and an additional seventeen Republicans abstained from voting. It was a
testament to the way that the ghastly war in Yemen has, quite bizarrely, become increasingly untenable
since Khashoggi’s death.
But
the GOP doesn’t deserve all the blame for yesterday’s outcome, because the
Yemen resolution wouldn’t have passed (by a mere three votes) had it not been
for the support of a handful of centrist Democrats and the absence on the floor
of several antiwar Democrats.
Let’s
have a closer look at the five Democrats who voted for the resolution. One was
Jim Costa, outgoing chairman of the conservative Blue
Dog Coalition and a member of the House Agriculture Committee. Costa doesn’t get
much money from the defense sector, but the oil and gas industries are
his second most generous donors, with names like
Edison International, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, and Pacific Gas and
Electric among his top donors. According to one expert on the global fossil-fuel
industry, “the threat of heaving an Iranian backed Houthi regime wielding power
on Yemen’s main strategic geographic choke-points” would be a “nightmare
scenario” for the oil industry, which, besides his seat on the Agriculture
Committee, perhaps also explains Costa’s vote, particularly given that the
Houthis have been targeting the Saudi coalition’s energy
infrastructure.
Costa,
who votes in line with Trump quite often despite
representing a district that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, has been deemed the fourth-most “primaryable” House
Democrat in the country by the left-wing think tank Data for Progress. If a
progressive or socialist challenger takes him on in 2020, they’ll no doubt be
sure to point out this vote for the Yemen war, as well as his otherwise
Trump-friendly voting record.
Someone
who does get a lot of money from the defense sector is
Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, a national security hawk who has long been targeted by defense industries while serving in powerful
positions affecting them. Ruppersberger has received nearly $120,000 from the
defense aerospace and electronics industries this cycle, including Northrop
Grumman, his single largest donor over the course of his career, and a company
that has profited handsomely from not just this war but the Saudi-US alliance as a whole. Ruppersberger,
who has voted symbolically against the war before,
issued a statement insisting he supports withdrawing
from Yemen but didn’t want to derail the farm bill.
Minnesota
Rep. Collin Peterson, cast his “yea” vote for similar reasons. The ranking
Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, Peterson told journalist Jeff Stein that he didn’t
want to jeopardize the farm bill, doesn’t “know a damn thing about” the war in
Yemen, and that “our party gets off on tangents,” declining to answer why the
House couldn’t do over the vote another time without the Yemen provision.
Peterson has previously voted against ending the war in
Yemen, and is ranked by Data for Progress just ahead of Costa for his
primarability.
Georgia
Rep. David Scott, who likewise voted for the bill, serves alongside Peterson on
the House Agriculture Committee. Long viewed with
suspicion by local progressives, Scott’s record includes voting with
Republicans to make it harder for families to file for
bankruptcy, trying to permanently repeal the estate tax, giving the fossil-fuel industry one of
its biggest giveaways of the past few decades,
and receiving consistently high scores from the National Association of
Police Organizations.
In
2008, Scott appeared on the Citizens for Responsibility
and Ethics in Washington’s list of “most corrupt” congressmen, owing to tax
evasion allegations and payments to himself, his business, and his family from
his campaign committee. Some of his notable Trump-era votes include:
support for rolling back parts of Dodd-Frank, eliminating the
medical device tax introduced by Obamacare, and abstaining on
a vote on a balanced budget amendment (it passed the House). Mystifyingly,
despite this record, Scott has served for sixteen years in his safe Democratic
seat, often fielding no primary challenger.
And
finally, there’s Al Lawson, another Trump-friendly congressman in a safe
Democratic seat, this time in Florida, who sits on the House Agriculture
Committee. He easily put away a primary challenge this
year from similarly mediocre Jacksonville mayor Alvin Brown,
who attacked Lawson for his support for school
vouchers and his vote in favor of the original “Stand Your Ground” law in 2005,
among other things.
So it
seems the five Democrats who voted to ensure innocent Yemenis continue to
starve and die for at least a couple more months have one thing in common:
they’re all uniformly disappointing Democrats on other issues, too. Worse, they
voted for the war only a day after a major, stomach-churning report on Saudi atrocities in the country
appeared in the New York Times.
An
added, head-scratching twist to all this was the failure to vote at all by
seven Democrats, several of them progressive, antiwar lawmakers who have
specifically registered their opposition to this war, and who would have tipped
the scales had they voted.
Keith
Ellison, a former Bernie Sanders surrogate who just won the Minnesota attorney
general’s race under a cloud of domestic abuse allegations, has been one of
the most outspoken opponents of the war, saying last year that “we have to stop this
war and famine”; Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva said less than three months agothat the US “has no
business aiding and abetting the perpetrators of the humanitarian crisis in
Yemen”; Michelle Lujan Grisham, who just became governor of New Mexico, has
voted against sending cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia and
for last year’s resolution against the Yemen
war; Alcee Hastings, Jared Polis (now the governor-elect of Colorado), and Tim
Walz all signed a letter last year demanding the administration explain its
legal justification for the war.
Each
of these lawmakers missed the vote yesterday, even though the resolution was
approved for a vote the day before.
In
a statement today, Grijalva called his
absence “an honest mistake,” and said he wasn’t present for the vote “due to a
miscommunication about the number of votes in the series.” Grijalva pointed to
his genuinely strong record against the war, and called the GOP’s actions
“nothing short of an accessory to war.”
I’ve
reached out to the other Democrats who missed yesterday’s vote, and this story
will be updated with their statements as they come in. One possibility is that
some of the absent Democrats were blindsided by the maneuver while they were
managing the transitions in their newly won state-level offices. Ellison, for
instance, has been working out of borrowed office
space in downtown Minneapolis.
Nonetheless,
the sum of what’s happened is that a small number of Democrats, either by
refusing to vote against a procedural resolution or by simply missing the vote,
have ensured that Yemenis, many of them small children, will continue to be
incinerated and starved to death until the next Congress takes office, at the
earliest. With any luck, there will still be enough momentum to try once more
to end US government support for this war — support without which it “would end
tomorrow,” to quote one former CIA and Pentagon official.
There
are no shades of gray in the Saudi-led war on Yemen. There are no moral
complexities. The details of its horrors are now finally unignorable. It was
monstrous when Barack Obama was giving it the green light, and it remains a
perverse monument to the depths of human cruelty and indifference nearly four
years later. What else is there to say anymore? We expect this kind of thing
from the likes of Paul Ryan; but even for this Democratic Party, this is a new
low.
Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff
writer. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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