Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to town next month to speak before a joint session of Congress, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest says that Joe Biden’s calendar is, um, filling up or something:
Biden has to date missed only one speech by a foreign leader at a joint session of Congress, Earnest said. The vice president really likes his ceremonial duties, he added, but might be busy on March 3, when Netanyahu is scheduled to deliver his warning to Congress about U.S. negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. The Obama administration considers the talks an important diplomatic opening that could lead to the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Netanyahu believes Iran has no intention of holding to any deal and U.S. diplomats are being naive.
This is all part of a growing Democratic “revolt” against Netanyahu’s speech:
Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein rushed to meetings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday trying to calm a furor created by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress next month and quell a Democratic revolt that has dozens threatening a boycott.
It didn’t work.
If anything, Democrats finished the day more frustrated….If Dermer really wants to fix the problems created by the speech, goes the consensus among Democrats in Washington, he’ll need to do more than apologize: he and Netanyahu have to cancel or reschedule the speech.
….Seven Jewish Democratic members of Congress who met Wednesday in Rep. Steve Israel’s (D-N.Y.) office…lit into Dermer. The invitation, they said, was making them choose between Netanyahu and Obama, making support for Israel into a partisan issue that they never wanted it to be, and forcing them to consider a boycott of the speech. One member, according to someone in the room, went so far as to tell Dermer it was hard to believe him when he said he didn’t realize the partisan mess he was making by going around Obama to get Boehner to make the invitation.
This has been a surprisingly slow-burning fuse. Obviously this mess puts a lot of Democrats in a tough position, but I still would have figured that they’d make their displeasure known sooner rather than later. And yet, for the week or so after Netanyahu announced his speech, we barely heard a peep of protest—even privately. But apparently Democratic anger was growing the whole time, and now Netanyahu has a full-grown public insurgency on his hands.
It’s been obvious for years—obvious to me, anyway—that Netanyahu has decided to tie his future to the Republican Party. Of course Dermer knew the speech would create a partisan mess. That was more a feature than a bug. But now it looks like Netanyahu has finally gone a step too far. After years of putting up with Netanyahu’s partisan antics, Democrats are finally getting tired of them. This episode is unlikely to end well for Israel.
