Getty THE GLOBAL POLITICO How Trump Is Driving Democrats and Republicans Together It’s not just Bob Corker feuding with Trump. His Democratic wingman Ben Cardin says the rest of the Foreign Relations panel is on board to take on the president.

Susan Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist and host of its new weekly podcast, The Global Politico.

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President Trump has notched at least one big foreign policy success: uniting senators of both parties against him on Capitol Hill.


That at least is the argument of Senator Ben Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is now working in close partnership with the panel’s Republican chairman, Bob Corker, as the retiring Tennessee senator feuds openly with Trump, chides the president’s appointees, and holds hearings to criticize his policies. Call it a rare outpost of bipartisanship in an increasingly polarized moment — or at least an example of a surprising and unintended side effect of Trump’s disruptive approach to the world.

“I believe on foreign policy that there is little difference between the Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Cardin said in an interview for The Global Politico, our weekly podcast on world affairs. He ticked off a list of issues on which he said the committee now agrees across party lines—and over which it appears to be more or less in open conflict with the Trump administration. Among them are imposing mandatory new sanctions on Russia, which ultimately passed the Senate 98-2 over the White House’s objections, keeping the Iran nuclear deal in place and pursuing a peaceful solution to the nuclear standoff with North Korea.

It’s a striking list. In more than two decades of observing Capitol Hill, I can’t remember a comparable moment when the generally staid Foreign Relations panel has been so assertive toward the president, especially given that Congress and the White House are controlled by the same party. To do so, you’d probably have to reach all the way back to the Vietnam era, and the skeptical hearings about the war held by the late, legendary Chairman William Fulbright.

“Clearly, Congress has taken on a stronger role. You see that with the sanctions bill we passed with Russia—and, by the way, also with North Korea and Iran—that discretion that is normally given to the president has been taken over by Congress in our role as the policy arm of government,” Cardin told me. “We have been more prescriptive on the responsibilities of the president on foreign policy, and that’s Congress’ prerogative, and we’ve done that under President Trump. Yes, we are taking a more active role.”

Corker offered a highly symbolic—or at least seriously trollish—signal of how far he’s willing to take his feud with Trump last week when he held a hearing on the president’s authority to order a nuclear strike—the first time in 40 years that such an issue has been discussed on Capitol Hill. The session was widely—and correctly, Cardin said—interpreted as a senatorial rebuke of the president’s loose and inflammatory rhetoric about the “fire and fury” he might unleash against North Korea. “Congress is looking for a way to assert itself in that regard,” Cardin said.

Some skepticism is certainly in order here. Congress isn’t about to wrest control of nukes—or any other major levers of international power—away from the commander-in-chief anytime soon. Despite post-Vietnam efforts to rein in the imperial presidency, the executive branch retains nearly all the control over American foreign policy. And many members of Congress are just as happy to punt when it comes to taking responsibility for decisions of war and peace that might prove unpopular with voters, a fact painfully underscored when President Barack Obama decided to seek authorization for a retaliatory strike on Syria after a chemical weapons attack on its own citizens—and members of Congress all but hid under their desks.

So no one’s suggesting Congress has suddenly grown a spine under Trump.

But the bipartisan talk of constraining and at times openly contradicting the president is something genuinely different about Trump’s Washington, and it already extends to a wide range of issues on the foreign policy front—a contrast to the fractured politics of such domestic issues as health care and taxes, where consensus is as elusive as the election results would suggest.

While those policy debates play out along more predictable Republican vs. Democrat lines, Cardin made the case for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will hang together against Trump on most of the pressing foreign policy issues of the day. He did not spell out exactly which Republicans he believes to be aligned with Democrats on these issues, though the panel does include, in addition to Corker, several other Republicans whose foreign policy views differ from Trump’s, such as his primary rival Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and another outspoken critic in Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who like Corker is not running for reelection.

“We believe that the best course for containing North Korea’s nuclear program is through diplomacy, and we disagree with the language the president has used, and the fact that he’s made it more difficult for diplomacy to work. We believe that in regard to the Iran nuclear agreement, that we have to enforce the agreement rigorously, but we don’t want the United States unilaterally withdrawing from that agreement,” Cardin said. “I think that’s what most Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee believe, and certainly in regard to Russia,” where Trump’s public “embracing Mr. Putin was the wrong signal,” and triggered the overwhelming Senate vote to overrule him on sanctions.

Both Cardin and Corker have also been increasingly critical of Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, warning of the department’s plummeting morale, “decapitation of leadership,” and ill-considered reorganization plans – foolish own-goals, for Cardin, at a time when the president has publicly undercut his top diplomat and devalued the role of diplomacy in America’ s foreign policy.

Tillerson “has made several major mistakes,” Cardin told me. “He hasn’t been the advocate for the Department of State he should have been.” When Trump proposed a more than 30 percent cut to the department’s budget, in fact, it was not Tillerson who objected—but Corker, who called it a “nonstarter” and refused even to take it seriously as a basis for negotiations. In our interview, Cardin said he expects the budget that will ultimately pass the Republican-controlled Senate to be a “repudiation” of the Republican president’s State budget.

A new confrontation could soon be brewing over Russia on the Hill, as the Trump administration faces a January deadline for imposing a first round of additional sanctions. The State Department missed the initial deadline to produce names of entitles to be sanctioned, leading many in Congress to wonder whether this was the Trump team slow-walking a policy to which the president remains opposed.

Administration sources have told me it’s not that, but a bureaucratic failure to meet the initial deadline, reflecting the lack of staffing and disorganization that remains persistent inside the State Department under its budget-cutting secretary—another black mark against Tillerson.

Cardin is not so sure but either way, he said, Congress will remain adamant about pushing Trump to get it done. “We’re watching very carefully to make sure they, in fact, impose the mandatory sanctions on the due dates,” Cardin said, “but we do know there is a reluctance on the behalf of the Trump administration.”

Unlike some of his Democratic colleagues, Cardin is no newcomer to the ranks of Russia hawks. In fact, you could even say he helped trigger Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

A longtime human rights activist who co-chaired the Helsinki Commission, Cardin teamed up with Republican Senator John McCain to pass the Magnitsky Act—over the objections of the Obama administration. Cardin and his staff worked closely on the bill to sanction corrupt Russian government officials with Bill Browder, a Western investor in Russia whose lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was unjustly imprisoned in Moscow after uncovering a massive fraud that implicated government officials, and later died in jail. In retaliation for the Magnitsky sanctions, Putin ordered an end to American adoptions of Russian children.

And that was precisely the issue about which Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya came to meet with Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign chief in Trump Tower during last year’s campaign—a meeting now part of the investigation into Putin’s election meddling.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has just issued the first indictments to flow from that investigation, and Cardin said when I asked about the probe that he believes “there’s lots of dots, and they’re starting to be connected” as far as Russia’s interference and ties to the Trump team.

But beyond that, he wouldn’t comment about the investigation and whether it could, or should, lead to Trump’s impeachment, as some Democrats are already beginning to say. After all, he noted, the Senate would have to sit in judgment in any trial of the president after an impeachment. That makes Cardin a potential juror. “I may,” as he put it, “be called upon to act.”