Rep. Jason Chaffetz has some advice for President Obama regarding Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday address to Congress.
“We are talking about semantics. Get over it. Get over it. He’s going to come here and speak,” the Utah Republican told Wolf Blitzer on CNN Monday night, referring to Obama and fellow Democrats’ disapproval for the Israeli prime minister’s upcoming speech to a joint session of Congress over a nuclear Iran.
Many Senate and House Democrats have said they will not attend the address because of the nature in which Netanyahu was invited to speak — House Speaker John Boehner extended an invite without alerting the White House. Chaffetz called members not showing up to Tuesday’s address a “broad mistake in the context.”
Chaffetz also expressed concern that Obama has given the Iranians too much time when it comes to their nuclear program: “This is not a regime that we can continue to appease and give them what they want, more than anything else, which is time.”
He didn’t stop there — Iran getting a nuclear weapon, he said, would be “the biggest problem that we have on the face of the planet.”
“We have to do anything and everything we can do in our powers to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” Chaffetz, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said.
And what exactly should the U.S. be doing to stop a Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? Chaffetz said he would support a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s unclear facilities.
“We negotiate from a position of strength. We do not do this through appeasement and bickering about what time the speaker called the president to say that Benjamin Netanyahu is going to show up. That is a distraction,” he added. “I think the president miscalculated on that. Get over it. He’s coming to speak to us, and we look forward to hearing him.”
