The highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the House has come out firmly against the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal and has pledged to work to defeat it.
“I’m going to vote against the Iran deal,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told Newsday Tuesday.
“I tried very hard to get to yes. But at the end of the day, despite some positive elements in the deal, the totality compelled me to oppose it,” he said.
Israel is the former head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ re-election arm.
Israel’s no vote was expected as were other prominent Democrats with heavily Jewish districts who also came out against the deal Tuesday, including Reps. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., and Ted Deutch, D-Fla.
“After a decade in public life working to stop Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons, I cannot support a deal giving Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief — in return for letting it maintain an advanced nuclear program and the infrastructure of a threshold nuclear state,” Deutch announced in a op-ed in the Broward County Sun Sentinel.
The news comes just one day after Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and an influential voice among moderates and Jewish lawmakers, came out strongly in favor of the deal.
Meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a top Jewish Democrat in Congress and the incoming Senate Democratic leader when Sen. Harry Reid, D-N.Y., retires next year, remains a wild card and the White House, as well as opponents of the deal, are lobbying him hard.
President Obama also is set to deliver a major speech on the Iran deal at American University Wednesday morning.
The White House is likening the speech to President Kennedy’s 1963 address at the same venue in which he announced diplomatic talks with the Soviet Union and other world powers that resulted in the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
The timing of the speech, just before the Senate joins the House for the August recess, and Obama departs for Martha’s Vineyard for two weeks, is designed as one last high-profile presidential push before an unpredictable few weeks when lawmakers will head home to their districts and face a flood of lobbying on both sides of the issue.
With most Republicans expected to vote in unison to sink the deal, the White House needs to hold Democrats together over the August recess.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest earlier this week predicted that House Democrats would be able to sustain a presidential veto of any GOP-backed resolution of disapproval. But he did not express the same confidence in the Senate.
Obama met with Jewish groups on both sides of the issue late Tuesday afternoon, and the White House said it would release attendees after it ends.
“[Obama] will make clear that this is an agreement that is not built on trust, but rather is built on the most intrusive set inspections that have ever been imposed on a country’s nuclear program,” Earnest said.
