Chris Lieberman, FISM News
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Senate Democrats blocked an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday that would ban Chinese imports made by Uyghur slave labor amid concerns that it may disrupt climate talks with China.
The NDAA, which funds and sets the agenda for the Pentagon, has passed Congress every year for the last 60 years, typically with bipartisan support. The Senate was set to vote on a package of 25 amendments to the bill on Wednesday, which included the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
The amendment would prohibit the import of products from the Xinjiang region of China, where the Chinese government has been imprisoning the Uyghur minority group in slave labor camps and committing genocide against them, unless companies prove that their product was not made with slave labor. The region is the world’s largest producer of solar panel parts.
In July, the Senate unanimously passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla). However, the House has not yet voted on the bill, which is why Rubio requested the bill to be included as an amendment on the NDAA, which would force the House to vote on it. But Democrats excluded the amendment from the vote on Wednesday night.
In response, Rubio vowed to withhold his approval of the other amendments until his amendment is included or the House passes similar legislation. The amendment package requires unanimous consent to proceed, so the bill is stalled without Rubio’s support.
Democrats claimed that the amendment could not be included on procedural grounds. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “If [Rubio’s] amendment were on the bill, it would automatically kill the bill, because it would be what’s called ‘blue-slipped’ in the House, which means any bill that produces revenue must start in the House. The Rubio amendment is a poison pill in the sense that it blows up the bill.”
Rubio pushed back against the “blue slip” argument, saying on the Senate floor, “They wield this blue-slip thing to mean whatever it is that they want it to mean. I support many, if not all, of the amendments on here. Some of them have bigger revenue implications, but apparently they don’t have blue slip because they’re for it.”
Senator Rubio continues fighting to end slave labor in China and Democratic leaders keep objecting.
Watch 👀 pic.twitter.com/LlGMWvL07v
— Senator Marco Rubio (@SenMarcoRubio) December 2, 2021
Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and a former Senate staffer, told the National Review that he believes the “blue slip” claims are a merely a political excuse from the Democrats:
If the House is really concerned about the blue slip and this is purely a procedural thing, they could have picked up the Rubio legislation that the Senate passed by voice vote in July, passed it through the House as an HR, and then just sent it back to the Senate.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that the Biden administration has been lobbying congressional Democrats to block the bill out of fear that it could hurt the president’s climate agenda by disrupting climate talks with China and reducing the import of solar panels. Sobolik said further:
With their words, the administration and its congressional allies insist that America can simultaneously cooperate and compete with Beijing. By their actions, they are dismissing potential complicity in an ongoing genocide to pocket dubious climate concessions from a regime with a track record of lying and breaking promises.