The New North Korea Sanctions Bill Will Be Named After Otto Warmbier

Nathan Lichtman | 2:00 AM on October 25, 2017

American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, March 16, 2016. North Korea's highest court sentenced Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia undergraduate student, from Wyoming, Ohio, to 15 years in prison with hard labor on Wednesday for subversion. He allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda banner from a restricted area of his hotel at the request of an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin)

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced Tuesday that the sanctions bill that Congress was passing for North Korea, which would place economic punishments on the Kim Jong-un regime, would be named after Otto Warmbier.

The University of Virginia student was imprisoned for allegedly stealing a DPRK propaganda flag, and then, upon a Trump administration negotiated release, died. He showed signs of torture, and so it’s a logical conclusion that Warmbier was killed by the North Koreans. McCarthy said Warmbier “was brutalized and tortured by the Kim regime.”

And the idea of North Korea sanctions definitely seems to have struck a bipartisan chord anyway. Especially after Kim Jong-un threatened to authorize a nuclear strike against the United States. People on the West Coast and in Guam are still living in fear. President Trump has claimed that he would meet any attacks on the U.S. with “fire and fury,” but in the hopes of avoiding a thermonuclear war, Congress is going to attempt economic sanctions first.