President Trump will not receive a handshake from at least one senior House Democrat, the lawmaker announced hours before Trump’s first speech before a joint session of Congress.
“The president needs to work with all people and therefore I will listen to what he has to say today, but I will not greet him and shake his hand,” New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during a brief speech on the House floor.
Engel, like several other lawmakers, has a long history of taking a seat on the aisle during State of the Union addresses; the positioning ensures that they are seen on television greeting the president as he enters and exits the joint session. But Engel intends the snub as a a rebuke of Trump’s attacks on the media, lack of support for investigating the Russia-linked cyberattacks against the Democratic party during the 2016 elections, and other policy disagreements, he said.
“I have deep respect for the presidency and I will attend the joint session, but that respect between branches must be mutual,” Engel said. “This goes beyond ideological and political differences.”
It’s a partisan moment for Engel, whose post at the Foreign Affairs Committee has produced regular instances of House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and Engel saluting each other for their bipartisan collaboration. “I could take his speech and read it he could take mine and read it and we’d all agree with it,” Engel said of Royce at a recent event on Iranian threats.
Engel’s announcement comes as congressional Democrats are mulling how they should treat Trump during his speech. “I don’t anticipate organized protests, that I’m aware of. I think that each member needs to be mindful of their own actions, that they are representatives of the House of Representatives and representatives of their constituency,” New York Rep. Joe Crowley, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus, told the Washington Examiner.
“As much as we have nothing in common with the president, we do respect the office of the presidency. I respect the office of the presidency itself, and keeping that in mind we will be polite, but we’ll show very little, if any enthusiasm at all for what I anticipate his speech will be about,” he said.
