Almost unnoticed, the House of Representatives on Tuesday passed yet another Concurrent Resolution, soon to receive the consent of the Senate, complete with ever more elaborate and rational reasons why the US embassy in Israel should be moved to Jerusalem. Equally unnoticed, the White House, a few days earlier, for the ... 14th? ... time now, invoked the Jerusalem Embassy Waiver which, as the NY Sun put it, "allows the president to ignore Congress" and keep the embassy wherever it damn well pleases.
Charming. Now these Concurrent Resolutions don't have the force of law and are simply opinions expressed by our elected representatives. The President doesn't need a waiver to ignore them. The reason he needs to invoke the Waiver is this little annoyance, the Jerusalem Embassy Act, an actual law passed by Congress in 1995, which is reaffirmed in the Resolution and which requires the embassy to be moved. Unless, that is, the President determines that the move would threaten national security interests and details how it would do so. Which is what the Waiver is all about. So.
I won't bore you yet again with links to my previous posts on this subject, nor to the several other nearly identical Concurrent Resolutions that have previously been ignored by Presidents Bush and Carter right up through 2006 (H. Res. 412 and S. Res. 98). Nor with links to Candidate Bush's repeated solemn campaign promises in 2000 to refuse to invoke the Waiver and to move the embassy if elected. I'm feeling lazy right now. But you can find them if you dig just a little.
And speaking of lazy, blogging will probably be even more sparse than usual around here for the next few days. Sorry.
