Secretary of State John Kerry lunched with Senate Democrats on Thursday, delivering one last plea to his former colleagues not to disrupt Iranian nuclear talks by passing additional sanctions before the negotiations wrap up.
Kerry plans to be traveling when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers his controversial speech to Congress on Iran’s nuclear development on Tuesday.
Emerging from the lunch, Kerry said he did not ask Senate Democrats to join several House Democrats in boycotting the speech.
“That’s not my bandwith,” he told reporters. “I encouraged people — I think people should obviously exercise their own judgment.”
Senators who attended the lunch said the Netanyahu speech came up in the conversations, but they declined to repeat what was said.
Kerry’s main point on Iran, they said, was to discourage any congressional effort to impose new sanctions on Tehran or pass any laws requiring congressional approval of any final nuclear deal.
“He didn’t express any wild optimism about Iran negotiations being successful, but he’s still very worried about the ways that Congress can undermine the negotiations,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told reporters.
On congressional consideration of a new authorization of the use of military force against the Islamic State, Kerry urged Democrats to accept the language, even those who think it is too broad in terms of allowing a limited number of U.S. troops to support the coalition fight.
“Some of us have major concerns about the language being too fuzzy and too broad,” Murphy said. “His message was that you’re going to have to do something risky in order to take these guys out.”
