Foreign Aid

After giving up his spot as the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is adding a new panel to his resume: the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

McCain was named to the Foreign Relations panel Thursday as the Republicans announced their committee assignments for the 113th Congress.

After serving three terms as ranking member of Armed Services, McCain was term-limited out. He said he would step down, and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is expected to take over as the top Republican.

The Senate on Friday rejected two amendments from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), which he said would help reduce spending in a Hurricane Sandy supplemental bill.

The Senate has been working on H.R. 1, a vehicle to provide $60.4 billion to Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts, but some conservatives have said the bill has unnecessary spending measures, during a time when lawmakers are trying to make spending cuts.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) introduced a 923-page bill to overhaul foreign aid on Wednesday as more and more Americans are balking at giving money to countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The bill aims to rewrite the rules for how America spends its money abroad for the first time since 1961, at the height of the Cold War. It would require online reporting of all foreign assistance data and more transparency on arms sales and military training, while making sustainability of the “global environment” a key aim of U.S. aid efforts. 

“Little by little people are losing confidence in why we're giving foreign assistance,” the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee told a small group of reporters Wednesday. “This is a serious effort to make it stronger and better, and to have documents and have transparency.” Read more...

Tunisia had refused for several weeks to grant the FBI access to a suspect in the Sept. 11 Benghazi attack.

Some Republicans want to punish both Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the United Nations.

Sen. Graham said "the Palestinians created this problem and this is a major setback for U.S.-Palestinian relations."

The State Department will not be sponsoring rocker Andrew W.K.’s “positive partying” tour of Bahrain, canceling the trip that was initially approved, a spokeswoman said Monday.

“When more senior management at the embassy took a look at this, the conclusion was that this was not an appropriate use of U.S. government funds,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland. “I think the conclusion was when they looked at the body of his work that we didn't need to be part of this invitation.”

McCain said Sunday the Obama administration should do more to denounce Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi's sweeping new powers.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) unearthed old complaints that President Obama ignored the law on abortion and Jerusalem in a catalog of examples in which he says the president overstepped his constitutional authority.

Cantor released his report on “The Imperial Presidency” on Tuesday as a closing indictment of all that Republicans think is wrong with Obama's leadership. Among the 40 or so examples are two instances of foreign policies included under the heading “ignoring the plain letter of the law and failing to faithfully execute the law.”

In his report, Cantor accuses the State Department of funding a group that advocated for abortion rights overseas as part of the $18 million the administration spent to help Kenya reform its constitution in 2010, in violation of the Siljander Amendment. The Government Accountability Office in a report last year found that the U.S. Agency for International Development provided funding to a group that made recommendations about fetal rights and abortion to the entity charged with drafting the constitution and faulted the State Department for not having “clear guidance” for compliance with the law.

Bill and Hillary Clinton joined hands with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and a bevy of celebrities Monday to launch a $300 million industrial park in the northern part of the country that represents the centerpiece of U.S. and international efforts to rebuild the Caribbean nation after its 2010 earthquake. Read more...