In what was one of the most stunning rebukes of a sitting president by a member of his own party, Sen. Robert Menendez accused President Obama of taking his talking points on Iran “straight out of Tehran” after the president’s State of the Union address. It’s not the first time the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has disagreed with the president. In early January, when the president announced his unilateral opening to Cuba, the New Jersey Democrat said the administration “got absolutely nothing for giving up everything that the Castro regime wants.” Menendez gives hope that there are at least a few Democrats who understand the nature of totalitarian regimes.
Menendez may not be Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the legendary Democratic hawk who was the scourge of the appeasement wing of his party in the U.S. Senate from 1941 to 1983, but he knows a bad deal when he sees one. And the president’s line on Iran’s nuclear program — that “we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material” — is nothing short of a lie. Now the question for Democrats will be whether others will join Menendez in pushing for tougher sanctions against Iran. The president has already announced he will veto a sanctions bill, but Menendez would need only 12 other Democrats to join the 54-member Republican majority to overturn a veto.
