State Department bill shelved after battle
WASHINGTON – With an unusual burst of bipartisan end-of-the-year goodwill, Congress nearly passed, after a 20-year hiatus, a State Department authorization bill this month. But then something happened to torpedo the effort in the final days.
The torpedo was Ivanka Trump. The officers trying to save the ship from the torpedo were Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.
And the two lawmakers, rather than cave to the attack from the White House, threw out the anchors, absorbed the explosion and watched as the State Department authorization bill was scuttled by the Senate and detached from the bigger annual defense policy bill, just to appease the president’s daughter and the White House.
With the bill’s drowning, hopes were sunk that maybe, just maybe, this would be the year that lawmakers would finally pass a full State Department authorization bill, which governs Foggy Bottom’s policies, programs and procedures.
Said a Democratic aide familiar with the contretemps, who was not authorized to be named: “Instead of the White House just acknowledging they are biting off more than anyone could chew, they just had a temper tantrum and State Authorization had to come out. Ultimately, that got flushed down the toilet, as we say colloquially, ‘because Ivanka didn’t get her pony.’ ”
Lawmakers got unusually close this year to clearing the State authorization bill after the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate, known as the “Four Corners,” agreed to attach an updated version of the Housepassed fiscal 2020 State authorization bill to the conference report for the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA.
“For the most part, we were willing to jettison anything that wasn’t ready for prime time” to get the bill passed, said the Democratic aide. “Ultimately, the bulk of (the) provisions had been reserved because they are longtime, inthe-weeds management fixes and tweaks that the State Department needs, many of which they’d been asking for, for years.”
But then came the disagreement between Ivanka Trump and Pelosi and Shaheen over Trump’s push to include language that would institutionalize her signature international development program: the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative.
Pelosi and Shaheen were initially open to adding a provision to the diplomatic policy bill that would codify Trump’s empowerment initiative and nest it within Foggy Bottom’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, which would also be permanently authorized by the legislation.
However, a push by anti-abortion groups, with Trump’s support, to include language that Democrats said would undermine the role of reproductive health in the work already underway by the Global Women’s office ultimately caused Pelosi and Shaheen to withdraw their support for codifying the W-GDP initiative.
When it became apparent that Democrats were not going to budge, the White House insisted that the entire State authorization measure be stripped from the NDAA.
The White House rejected any blame for the inability to pass the broader diplomatic bill, accusing Pelosi of acting out of spite in seeking to prevent Trump’s hallmark initiative from being enshrined at the State Department.