President Donald Trump wants to spend the final weeks of his presidency transferring America’s most advanced fighter jet, a set of powerful armed drones and thousands of bombs and missiles to a Middle Eastern dictatorship that is deeply implicated in multiple civil wars and aggressively represses its own population.
A growing group of lawmakers and activists is mobilizing to stop him.
Trump plans to wrap up a $23 billion weapons sale to the United Arab Emirates by the middle of December. It would put an exclamation point on a presidency that has focused more on arms deals than any since President Dwight Eisenhower first warned of the political power of the military-industrial complex.
Before that happens, critics of the deal want both houses of Congress to pass resolutions disapproving of the transfer.
On Wednesday, Republican Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) joined Democratic foreign policy heavyweights Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.) in sponsoring four resolutions of disapproval for the arms sales. Now those lawmakers and a coalition of influential activists from humanitarian, anti-war and human rights groups will spend the weeks ahead convincing Congress to support the legislation and pushing leadership in the two chambers to bring it to a vote, starting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Despite the uphill battle members of Congress and activists are faced with, a dozen well-informed observers told HuffPost they are increasingly confident that a rare combination of progressives, hawks and more on Capitol Hill will send a big signal about changing U.S. foreign policy to prioritize human rights and give less credence to bellicose, often unreliable dictators abroad. | 
