Both Republicans and Democrats as well as the news media are fixated on a controversial speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, scheduled to take place on Tuesday.
“The demand for seats in the House, the demand for tickets, I’ve never seen anything like it. Everybody wants to be there,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CBS Sunday. Boehner is the one who initiated the invitation to Netanyahu in January. The White House criticized it as a breach in protocol for failing to alert the Obama administration in advance of what is a foreign policy issue.
“What I do wonder is why the White House feels threatened, because the Congress wants to support Israel and wants to hear what a trusted ally has to say,” said Boehner. “It has been, frankly, remarkable to me, the extent to which, over the last five or six weeks, the White House has attacked the prime minister, attacked me, for wanting to hear from one of our closest allies.”
President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and several congressional Democrats have said they will not attend the speech, which is expected to be highly critical of White House negotiations with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear development program.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said on Sunday she will attend. “I’m going to go. I’m going to listen quite respectfully,” she said. “I’m not going to jump up and down, which is likely to be the posture in that room. I am very concerned about that speech.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,”Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said she would not be attending but that she would see it on TV. She said that she didn’t want to be part of what she viewed was an attempt by GOP leadership to “divide” Congress and “stick it to the president.”
Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman said on the show that all Democrats should indicate their support for Israel by showing up for the speech, rather than protesting it.
Though National Security Adviser Susan Rice recently said that the speech would be “destructive” to U.S.-Israeli relations, Secretary of State John Kerry attempted to defuse some of the tension as it draws closer.
“Look, we’re not — the prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States,” Kerry said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Obviously, and we have a closer relationship with Israel right now in terms of security than at any time in history.”
Kerry added, “Obviously it was odd, if not unique, that we learned of it [the speech] from the speaker of the House and that the administration was not included in this process. The administration is not seeking to politicize this. We recognize the main goal here is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
