Liberal Democrats are all over the map when it comes to Syria.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) demanded Tuesday that the Pentagon end its contract with Rosoboronexport, a Russian arms dealer, because it is inadvertently harming Syrians.

“American taxpayers should not be indirectly subsidizing the murder of Syrians,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor. “If the Pentagon keeps this contract it will undermine U.S. support to the Syrian people.”

Sens. Bob Menendez, Carl Levin and John McCain are urging President Obama to take out Syria's air defenses.

Republican senators on Tuesday said they were skeptical that anything would come from of the Taliban’s agreement to start peace talks with the United States and the Afghan government.

Several Republicans said the Obama administration had spoken with them about the agreement on Monday, before it was announced publicly, and they didn’t oppose the notion of talking.

But there was deep pessimism that the Taliban would be willing lay down arms until it’s defeated on the battlefield, and until the U.S. states what size force it will leave behind in Afghanistan after it fully transfers security control to the Afghans in 2014.

The chairman and ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs panel announced Tuesday that they will propose reforming the nation's food aid program as a bipartisan amendment to the pending farm bill. 

Reps. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said their amendment would save the federal government $215 million a year by allowing the U.S. Agency for International Development to spend up to 45 percent of food aid funds of local food instead of shipping it from the United States. The House is expected to vote on a five-year farm bill this week.

“By enacting these bipartisan, commonsense food aid reforms, we can do more with less – we can feed more starving people, more quickly, at a lower cost,” Royce said in announcing the amendment.

More than a dozen U.S. business groups are banding together to resolve what they argue is a sharp rise in discriminatory trade practices by India.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) on Tuesday helped launch a new alliance that is urging the Obama administration to work toward solutions to widespread problems they say are benefiting India's businesses at the expense of U.S. jobs.

"India’s unfair trade practices against U.S. manufactured exports is putting jobs at risk and harming American manufacturing workers,” said Linda Dempsey, NAM's vice president for international economic affairs.

The group is specifically asking Secretary of State John Kerry, who is heading to India this month, to immediately engage at the highest levels of the Indian government to stop practices that they say are undermining the long-standing trade relationship. 

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) announced Tuesday that he would introduce a resolution expressing concern over the imprisonment of a former Ukraine prime minister.

Durbin said it was wrong for the Ukrainian government to hold its former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in prison for political reasons, adding that’s not how a real political Democracy behaves.

Opponents of proposed coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest were dealt a blow Tuesday when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it wouldn’t conduct a broad environmental evaluation for the projects.

Jennifer Moyer, the Corps’s acting regulatory chief, said during a House hearing that there is “no compelling justification” to conduct an area-wide environmental impact statement for each of the three outstanding applications to build coal export terminals in Washington and Oregon.

“They are independent projects in different locations, whose impacts are not related,” she told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Energy and Power.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday selected former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to serve as special envoy for the Africa Great Lakes region, according to The Associated Press.