The Cause of Congressional Oversight Effort of the U.S. Arms Sale Plans

• In Event: Congressional Influence on American Foreign Policymaking

Abstract

Why do members of the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) propose the Joint Resolution to disapprove of the US President’s plan to sell weapons to foreign countries? The Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the approval of both the President and Congress for the US foreign arms sales. According to the Act, the President should report the arms export proposals to the congressional committees of the House and Senate before the export license is issued. Members from both committees can propose a Joint Resolution to prohibit the proposals unless the President states that the proposed plan is an emergency for the US national security interest.
The majority of previous studies on congressional policy choices and voting largely focus on the influence of partisanship. Also, the research about congressional decisions of foreign arms sales has largely focused on the effect of political situations of target countries such as humanitarian crises. These approaches, however, do not provide satisfactory explanations of the proposal of Joint Resolutions. This is mainly because the successful passage of a Joint Resolution of disapproval is very unlikely as it requires support from at least 2/3 of both chambers to override the President’s expected veto.
Members of Congress, however, still have incentives to propose a Joint Resolution against arms sales plans due to its nature of being structural policy. The policy is about deploying vast military resources and involves multiple actors with diverse interests such as individual manufacturers and their employees. This implies that the members of Congress have political interest to express disagreement with the President’s arms proposal to maintain support from their constituents regardless of successful passage of the Joint Resolution.
In this paper, I analyze political factors that incentivize the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) to propose a Joint Resolution to block the President’s arms sale plans. I argue that the members are less likely to propose a Joint Resolution when their political constituents, particularly arms manufacturers in their districts, see the proposal as beneficial. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used for the analyses.
For the empirical analysis, I collected data of the proposed Joint Resolutions by the members of the HFAC from 111th to 116th Congress and financial contribution from the arms manufacturing companies designated to sell arms to foreign countries. The empirical results show that the probability of proposing Joint Resolutions by the Representatives of the Committee decreases when they get more financial contributions from the designated companies that employ people in their districts.
For the qualitative analyses, I interview ten former members of the Committee who proposed at least one Joint Resolution in their term. For the members who have arms manufacturing companies in their districts but without any financial support from them, having a different party affiliation with the President made them propose a Joint Resolution. On the other hand, the members without any designated arms companies in their districts answered that humanitarian concerns of the potential recipient countries mattered more for proposing a Joint Resolution against the President’s plan.
The analyses show that Joint Resolution proposals by the members of HFAC are not simply out of partisan concern. Instead, they are also the outcome of consideration of both potential effects on support from their constituents and humanitarian concerns. More specifically, their vote choices are affected by financial contributions from arms manufacturing companies in their districts. In addition, the members also consider the effects of selling US arms to potential recipient countries with humanitarian crises.
This paper expands the discussion of the US arms sale policy decision-making processes by focusing on the Joint Resolution proposal by the members of congressional committees, particularly the House Committee on Foreign Relations. It shows that diverse political factors such as financial contributions from their constituents and international affairs can affect decisions of individual members of Congress. The findings of the paper support that non-partisan factors also affect congressional vote choices with some conditions.

Author

• Hoshik Nam, University of Iowa