Senate panel’s new boss won’t openly battle Trump
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee used his perch atop the storied Foreign Relations Committee to offer barbed criticisms of the president’s foreign policy, once acidly referring to the White House as an “adult day care center” that would set the nation on a path to World War III.
For two years, the committee served as an arena for senators to air their grievances with President Donald Trump’s isolationist foreign policy, as Corker strove to take his place among the powerhouses who once wielded the gavel: Henry Clay, Charles Sumner, Henry Cabot Lodge, Arthur Vandenberg, William Fulbright, Frank Church, Joe Biden, John Kerry and Richard Lugar.
Its new chairman, Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, appears intent on taking the committee in a new direction.
“My repertoire does not include sparring publicly with the president of the United States,” Risch told the Idaho Press last month. “For many, many different reasons, I think that’s counterproductive, and you won’t see me doing it.”
He added, “We exchange ideas about how we feel on things, but when we do disagree, we do it face to face, and not on the front page of the New York Times.”
GOP senators unhappy
Risch, a former trial lawyer and current cattle rancher, has taken the gavel of the vaunted committee as dissatisfaction among Senate Republicans with the president’s foreign policy has only mounted.
In December, Senate Republicans publicly broke with the president to approve a resolution withdrawing U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. This month, they were even more emphatic, voting almost unanimously to express their disapproval of his abrupt withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
House Republicans voted last month to bar a U.S. exit from NATO after the Times reported that Trump had expressed an interest in shattering the alliance.
But none of those issues has merited a hearing before the new Senate Foreign Relations Committee or a sharp word from its new chairman.
Leveraging the committee’s oversight power is “a critical element of getting to the right place,” said Wendy Sherman, an undersecretary of state and acting deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
“I’m not saying that Sen. Risch should be combative with the president, but where there is disagreement, we rely on the U.S. Senate,” Sherman said. “They can take the long view, and for them to defer to the president on everything really undermines the strength of that committee and the historic role that it’s played.”
Allies of the new chairman describe him as a workhorse, not a show horse. On policy, Trump has a friend at the helm of the Foreign Relations Committee. Risch has broken with the president on occasion, joining his colleagues to protest Trump’s appetite for leaving NATO and taking an aggressive stance on Russia.
‘There’s a weasel here’
But after the Washington Post reported that Trump disclosed classified information provided by Israel to the Russian foreign minister, Risch told CNN: “There’s a weasel here, and the weasel is not the president of the United States. It’s the traitor who disclosed these facts to the Washington Post.”
While he joined his peers in voting for a bipartisan amendment sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky that warned the president of the dangers of a “precipitous withdrawal” of troops from Syria and Afghanistan, he took to the Senate floor to chastise news outlets for “badly mischaracterizing” the measure as a rebuke to Trump. Instead, he said, it commended the president “for all the things he’s been able to do in Syria in getting ISIS (the Islamic State group_ contained down to the very small area that remains.”