Senate Democrats Block Uyghur Forced-Labor Bill

A bicameral campaign to put up roadblocks against a critical measure to protect the human rights of Uyghurs and other minorities persecuted by Beijing came into sharper focus last night, when Senate Democrats blocked an amendment that would insert the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into the annual defense-authorization bill.

The Democrats say this boils down to a simple procedural problem — that the amendment in question skirts the House’s constitutional prerogative to be the exclusive source of spending and revenue measures. But this is merely a fig leaf of justification for stonewalling a piece of legislation that Uyghur advocates say is critically important to combat the Chinese Communist Party’s mass atrocities. And the senators are doing this amid stepped-up lobbying from companies that stand to lose something from combating modern slavery in China and entreaties from the Biden administration to delay or water down the legislation.

The Uyghur provision would ban the import of products from the Xinjiang region, where Beijing is carrying out genocide and mass atrocities, unless companies prove to customs officials that they were not produced using forced labor. The legislation has attracted bipartisan support, and, in fact, it passed the Senate under the unanimous-consent process in July. Since then, it’s been stalled for months in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has declined to put it up for a vote on the floor.

Which is why Marco Rubio has fought to insert the bill into the National Defense Authorization Act this year. But after it became clear last night that Senate Democrats would block his attempt to amend the defense package to do that, the Florida Republican cut off all further consideration of NDAA amendments, bringing the process to a halt.

An indignant Chuck Schumer lambasted the move. Adopting the amendment “would automatically kill the bill because it would be what’s called ‘blue-slipped’ in the House, which means any bill that produces revenues must start from the House, and the House will kill a bill that has an amendment that contains it,” the Senate majority leader argued. During a press conference this morning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed the “blue slip” argument: “That is a prerogative of the House of Representatives. Read the Constitution.”

But there are gaping holes in their story, the most obvious of which is that the Uyghur forced-labor amendment was included on Tuesday evening on a list of amendments that would be voted on — raising the question of why Senate leadership would consider entertaining the amendment in the first place if it intended to prevent it from being added to the bill in the end.

The amendment list circulated on Tuesday is all the more strange considering that the blue-slip objection wasn’t new — it wasn’t as though Senate Democrats just came up with it. In fact, Rubio’s colleagues also blocked the Uyghur forced-labor amendment from inclusion in the NDAA the Thursday before Thanksgiving on the same grounds. There’s some partisan gamesmanship going on here.

Rubio pointed to a double standard in a speech last night: “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.” According to the Florida senator’s office, he was referring to amendments on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and Magnitsky Act sanctions, which likely have more significant revenue implications but have not been subject to the same stonewalling. (Senate Democrats actually also did try to block the Nord Stream 2 amendment — another political inconvenience for them — claiming blue-slip issues, but it seems likely to be put to a vote if the current logjam is broken.)

In fact, according to a copy of a Congressional Budget Office cost-estimate document reviewed by National Review, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would have “insignificant effects on direct spending and revenues.” There’s a problem only because the House Ways and Means Committee has decided that there’s a problem — therefore giving Schumer a reason to object to the Uyghur amendment. Through the committee’s invocation of a blue-slip issue, the House leadership can stall legislation over supposed procedural problems, even for as limited a bill as this one.

At the end of the day, the objections to this are purely political. “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,” says Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council and a former Senate staffer, speaking to National Review.

A Schumer spokesperson has yet to respond to an email inquiry from National Review about whether the majority leader is calling on the House to pass a standalone version. It’s an important question, though, because Pelosi has decided against taking up the standalone version of the bill, even though both the Senate and the House Foreign Affairs Committee have advanced it with overwhelming bipartisan support. Last month, House Democrats also quietly removed a provision from the Build Back Better Act prohibiting new science funding from going to entities complicit in the Uyghur genocide. Schumer and the Senate are playing a role in this inexplicable effort to ensure that Uyghur legislation dies on the vine, but the speaker’s office seems to be driving the agenda on the Hill.

During her remarks at this morning’s press conference, Pelosi burnished her well-established, though now eroding, reputation as a loud advocate for human rights in China and cast Rubio’s objections as mystifying since the House, she said, will pass a version of his legislation: “I don’t know why he’s holding up the DOD bill when he knows that there will be a strong Uyghur bill.”

In fact, he doesn’t know that, as a staffer for his office tells National Review today, “because they haven’t done anything.” And the one thing Pelosi did not address is when she intends to bring the bill to a vote.