Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) is planning to introduce legislation today or tomorrow that would remove the presidential waiver from the law calling for the U.S. Embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jersualem. He announced his sponsorship of the Jersualem Embassy Relocation Act of 2009 on Tuesday afternoon at a Capitol Hill meeting of the Jerusalem Conference.
The legislation would call on the State Department to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and get rid of the waiver in the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Law that every president since then has renewed every six months.
The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, you see, required that the U.S. Embassy in Israel was to be moved to Jerusalem by May 31, 1999, and further called for a restriction on the use of federal funds for the maintenance and acquisition of U.S. buildings abroad (like embassies) if it wasn't. But the act contained an escape hatch in Sec. 7, Presidential Waiver, allowing the President to suspend those restrictions for six months if he should deem it necessary in the interests of national security. And every six months since, the President (Clinton, Bush, and now Obama) has exercised that waiver. In the interests of national security, of course.
So far, Brownback's bill does not appear to have materialized. Not much can be expected from it if it does. This is a hot potato that Congress no longer seems interested in touching and various attempts at concurrent resolutions over the past several years trying to push it to the front burner have either never made it out of committee or been buried in the Senate. A shame.
