IPA: ‘Leahy Law’ resolution could apply to Israel next

Presenter: The Democratic National Committee calls for consistent enforcement of the Leahy Laws, which say  the U.S. should not provide material support to foreign entities that are known to have committed human rights violations. That resolution could eventually be applied to Israel.

At the DNC meeting Aug. 13 in Austin, Texas, Resolution Committee co-chair Ron Harris: 

Ron Harris (DNC Resolutions Committee, co-chair): On to No. 24, resolution reaffirming the Democratic Party’s commitment to full and consistent enforcement of the Leahy Laws. Is Michelle Johnson in the room there? There she is. Chair will recognize Michelle Johnson for brief remarks.

Michelle Johnson: Good morning y’all. My name is Michelle Johnson. I’m a member from Louisiana.

I was in Equatorial Guinea during an election where we were confined to where we were staying, and every road out was held by a checkpoint of men with rifles. So I want to tell you what it’s like that our government has now made that country a partner.

Democrats wrote the Leahy Law precisely so the United States would never underwrite security forces that torture and disappear people, and that standard has been ours for 30 years.

Yet last year the State Department wired $7.5 million directly to that government to take 29 people we deported—some of them with asylum claims still pending—and it drew that money from the account Congress funds for refugee emergencies.

Returning a person to a country where they face torture violates the convention against torture, a treaty we were party to and largely wrote.

So what we have done here is not just abandon our own rule, but demonstrate to every other government that the rule carries a price and that the price is cheap.

Sen. (Jeanne) Shaheen, our ranking member on Foreign Relations, wrote to the secretary of state asking him to explain this, and she has never been answered.

I’m asking this party to stand behind our own senator and our own law, and I ask for your support. 

Ron Harris (DNC Resolutions Committee, co-chair):  All those in favor of adopting the resolution, say ‘Aye.’ (Aye.)  Any opposed? All right. Resolution No. 24 is passed. Thank you so much. Moving on to 25. 

Presenter: Shortly after the vote, we asked Sam Rosenthal of Roots Action to share his thoughts on passage of that DNC resolution. 

Sam Rosenthal (Roots Action): I think that I, and we at Roots Action were a little bit pleasantly surprised, frankly. We came into this anticipating that there wouldn’t be majority support for the two resolutions we were watching most closely, which were 24 and 27; 24 being about Leahy Law and 27 about ICE and abolishing ICE.

And they both passed the DNC resolutions committee—the one about the Leahy laws unanimously, and the one abolishing ICE, the abolish ICE language was like 25-12, I think was the vote. 

So you know, we’ve been to a bunch of these DNC meetings and we’ve seen them get voted down pretty consistently. So that was a welcome surprise for us.

The Leahy Law is something that’s been on the books for a long time. It’s U.S., it’s domestic law. This isn’t like international law. It’s domestic policy named after Sen. (Patrick) Leahy, who introduced when he was not yet a senator who introduced the legislation in the late ‘90s. 

And Leahy Law just basically says that the U.S. should not provide material support to foreign entities that are known to have committed human rights violations. It’s pretty straightforward.

The State Department maintains a list of organizations that are not to, per the Leahy laws, not get material support from the U.S. And so lots of critics of the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel have long pointed to this law and said, effectively, ‘Why are we not applying the these laws to the U.S.-Israel relationship?’

The IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, are very credibly accused by lots of mainstream international organizations of having committed gross human rights violations in Palestine and in Israel. And so there are lots of people, you know, myself included, who think that these laws should also be applied as they are to every other country, to Israel.

And so. Although this resolution doesn’t mention Israel by name, I think part of the attempt here by progressives on the DNC is to say we are reaffirming that no one is exempt from this. 

Again, domestic U.S. law, and no one is exempt from this law, that we want all foreign entities to be treated equally in the eyes of the State Department, in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Michelle Johnson, who’s a DNC member from Louisiana, has been one of the leading voices on this issue in the DNC. And I mean, I think this is just common sense. I don’t think your average U.S. citizen off the street would object to the application of these laws.

Of course, we shouldn’t be, the U.S. shouldn’t be supplying any kind of support to entities that are known to be violators of human rights, whether it’s their own citizens in other countries. That’s not something that U.S. taxpayers want their taxes going towards. So I think it’s a fairly straightforward vote to take. 

But of course it becomes complicated when we consider the implications of what the Israel-right-or-wrong lobby, you know, how they might meddle in the process.

Just to back up for a second, we should say too, that resolutions that the DNC passes and the resolutions committee and then by the full DNC, these are non-binding. They don’t mean that now everyone who’s running on the Democratic Party ballot line needs to adopt these resolutions.

It doesn’t mean that this is the official position of whoever’s running for president for the Democratic Party in 2028. You know, this is really just an expression by the DNC of where it thinks the party is headed politically, and they tend to be sort of conservative, small-c conservative.

Because they don’t want to hamstring folks who are running in elections where they might need latitude to make different kind of policy claims depending on their district.

Now we feel that they have been far too conservative in that if you look at opinion surveys. Among the Democratic Party, ending the special relationship with Israel, abolishing ICE, they’re really, really popular with the base of Democratic voters.

We’re talking about like upwards of 75% of Democrats agreeing with both of those positions. So it’s not too radical for the DMC to be voting yes on these resolutions. 

But again, this is an entity that, you know, we think has been fairly slow moving when it comes to public opinion. And so we’re heartened to see this change.

We still have seen a lot of difficulty with passing any resolution that is critical of Israel explicitly at the DNC Resolutions committee. They’ve come up repeatedly over the last few years since the Gaza War started and they just have not done well.

Everything from procedural moves that DNC members use to block those resolutions to introducing resolutions that preempt the more progressive ones that are more kind of ‘milquetoast,’ in their language. 

So I would like to see a resolution that says: ‘Last meeting we passed this resolution about the Leahy Laws and we encourage members of the Democratic party to apply that to countries like Israel that are shown to be violating human rights.’ 

But I think that that is the next step down the road. I’m not sure how well that would fare compared to this resolution.

Presenter: We asked if the string of progressive wins in the primary elections prompted this move by the DNC. From Roots Action, Sam Rosenthal:

Sam Rosenthal (Roots Action): Yeah, I think it has, and I think it’s really both those election wins and the comparatively less-attention-getting but still significant victories that the Resolutions Committee is having here, are really testaments to organizing that progressive activists have been doing inside the party for a long time, and we’re starting to see the fruits of that labor.

And I think there was no more profound statement of that than to see these election wins. Michigan you know, New York has long kind of led the way for progressive change. 

But to see in Michigan—a purple state—that there’s an appetite for electing a Muslim progressive to the Democratic primary to run in the general, I mean, that’s really a strong statement about where voters in the party want the party to go. 

And I think the question for us now is: Is the Democratic party—the institution— capable of tailing that momentum or are they going to be a barrier to channeling some of that momentum?

And we’re really just encouraging the Democratic Party to look around and say: This is where our voters are headed. They want things like Medicare For All. They don’t want their tax dollars to go to countries abroad that are violating human rights. They want investment at home. They want solutions to the rising prices of groceries, of consumer goods. They want a solution to affordable housing. 

That’s where the party is, that’s where the voters are. And I think that there can’t be a clearer statement than to see these wins by Abdul Al-Sayed, to see Democratic socialists in New York basically sweep their congressional elections.

And I think even, you know, to a lesser extent, like Francesca Hong in Wisconsin didn’t win, but she came incredibly close to winning on a message of affordability. And these are candidates who even two years ago, four years ago, would’ve been seen as extreme longshots—and they’re winning, or they’re coming incredibly close to winning.

And I think it really just speaks to how rapidly the way that Democratic Party voters are thinking about what they want to see is changing.

Presenter: Sam Rosenthal, Political Director at Roots Action. You can learn more at RootsAction.org.

Produced by John Q. Murray for KEPW-Whole Community News.