The White House’s chief spokesman compared senators who voted to override President Obama’s veto of the Sept. 11 Saudi bill and are now expressing reservations about the impact of the law to kindergartners “feigning ignorance” about the impact of their actions.
“What’s true in kindergarten is true in the U.S. Congress … ignorance is not an excuse particularly when it comes to the safety of our service members and diplomats,” presidential press secretary Josh Earnest said Thursday.
After the successful override vote, at least 28 senators who voted in favor of it signed a letter to the bill sponsors, Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., expressing concern about the bill’s impact and requesting fixes to the law that could help avoid any unintended national security and foreign policy consequences it would have.
Earnest referred to the letter as “rapid onset buyer’s remorse” and continued to chide lawmakers for casting their vote and then turning around and questioning its impact.
“Within minutes of casting their vote to put that bill into law, you had members of the U.S. Senate, some 28 of them, write a letter expressing deep concern about the potential impact of the bill they just passed,” he said.
Earnest said the letter suggested that some members of the Senate didn’t know what they were voting for and didn’t understand the negative consequences.
“That’s a hard assertion to take seriously” when prominent officials including Defense Secretary Ashton Carter to General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have gone to Obama himself vociferously arguing against it, Earnest said.
The White House also took issue with statements from Sen. Bob Corker, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the White House has been absent in trying to meet to hash out a compromise.
Earnest said Corker needs to “get his story straight.”
Last week, Earnest argued, Corker was saying he had reservations about the bill but voted in favor of overriding the veto anyway, and this week he is suggesting “that his repeated requests to the administration were not given their due attention.”
“I think it’s also curious that a number of members of the U.S. Senate, including Sen. Corker, would suggest that they voted for a bill they knew had problems … because they felt snubbed by the White House.”
A Cornyn spokesperson said he and other sponsors of the bill have been negotiating changes to the measure since 2009, and there have been many difference drafts and feedback from members and the Obama administration.
Cornyn and Schumer, the aide said, have consulted with both the State Department and a number of senators, including Corker.
The Texas Republican took to the Senate floor Wednesday before the override vote and argued that the bill has been a work in progress for many years.
“That means this bill has been negotiated and hammered out over a long period of time, and that’s the reason we were able to garner such strong support from both bodies to get the bill passed,” Cornyn said Wednesday.
Following consultations with the State Department, the Cornyn aide said the bill’s authors added a provision allowing U.S. courts to stay a proceeding against a foreign state if the Secretary of State certifies that the U.S. is engaged in good faith discussions with the “foreign state defendant concerning the resolution of the claims…”
The attorney general can petition the court for an extension of the stay for an additional 180-day period.
