{"id":177752,"date":"2019-06-20T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-21T00:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/20\/this-should-have-happened-4-years-ago\/"},"modified":"2019-06-20T19:55:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T00:55:00","slug":"this-should-have-happened-4-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/06\/20\/this-should-have-happened-4-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"This Should Have Happened 4 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Senate has voted to block US arms sales to the House of Saud for the war in Yemen<\/a>:<\/div>\n

The Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, in a sharp and bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration\u2019s attempt to circumvent Congress to allow the exports by declaring an emergency over Iran.<\/p>\n

In three back-to-back votes, Republicans joined Democrats to register their growing anger with the administration\u2019s use of emergency power to cut lawmakers out of national security decisions, as well as the White House\u2019s unflagging support for the Saudis despite congressional pressure to punish Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the killing in October of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A United Nations report released Wednesday<\/a> made the most authoritative case to date that responsibility for the killing and its cover-up lies at the highest levels of the Saudi royal court.<\/p>\n

No other foreign policy issue has created as large a rift between President Trump and Congress, and the vote to block the arms sales deepens the divide. It is the second time in just a few months that members of Mr. Trump\u2019s party have publicly opposed his foreign policy, with both the House and Senate approving<\/a> bipartisan legislation this spring to cut off military assistance to Saudi Arabia\u2019s war in Yemen using the 1973 War Powers Act, only to see it vetoed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The vote came the same day that Britain announced it would temporarily suspend approval<\/a> of any new licenses to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, after an unexpected court ruling that ministers had acted unlawfully in allowing the sale of weapons when there was a clear possibility they might be used in violation of international humanitarian law in Yemen. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This war, and the criminal brutality, has been going on for far too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate has voted to block US arms sales to the House of Saud for the war in Yemen: The Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars of munitions to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, in a sharp and bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration\u2019s attempt to circumvent …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[447,370,364,394,509,449,378,374,377],"class_list":["post-177752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-congress","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-house-of-saud","tag-legislation","tag-middle-east","tag-politics","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}