The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act (H.R. 3127/S. 1462) continues to slowly move forward as Congress enters the home stretch of the legislative year prior to an as yet undetermined adjournment date in late November or early December. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar has favorably reported the bill out of committee, and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has indicated his support for bringing the bill to the floor as soon as an anonymous hold is lifted. [Emphasis added]
The emphasized part is the key. Tapped continues:
Last April the White House sent a letter to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis asking him to quash the Darfur Accountability Act (which was then attached to the Iraq supplemental) by the time it came out of the conference committee. I got ahold of that letter, as did Nicholas Kristof, and we held it up as yet another example of the administration's lily-livered response to genocide. It seems that the White House wanted to avoid repeating that embarrassment this time around so they gave their favorite hack a call and told that senator not to let the legislation even make it to conference committee. Disgusting.
If this is true--that the anonymous hold on this critical legislation was put up at the behest of the Bush administration, then they've lost any credibility they once enjoyed on opposition to genocide. It's one thing to decide that Darfur is a dead issue and not expend political capital to push a skeptical congress to act. It's quite another to deliberately hold up progress and put the administration expressly on the side of the murderers. Unfortunately, it seems like the Bush administration has come to a decision: pro-murder, anti-intervention.
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