Quote:After Iraq, Democrats didn’t want to vote for war.
Ha’aretz
It’s now virtually certain that the Iran nuclear deal will survive congressional challenge. If opponents pass a bill rejecting the agreement, supporters have the votes to sustain U.S. President Barack Obama’s veto in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, a bill condemning the deal may not even garner enough votes to pass in the first place.
The interesting question is why.
The first, and most obvious, answer is that when a president really wants something in foreign policy, he’s hard to stop. After World War II, when America established a de facto global empire, the balance of power between the president and Congress tipped. The executive branch now contains a vast, semi-secret national security bureaucracy that makes split-second decisions — for instance, whether to launch a drone strike halfway across the world — without ever asking Congress. Members of Congress have become accustomed to deferring to presidents overseas in a way they don’t at home. Even when the Iraq War grew politically toxic, Congress never cut off its funding. Congress still refuses to vote on Obama’s war against ISIS; they’d rather leave it to him.
The Iran deal is unusual in that members of one party — the GOP — are refusing to show that deference. In fact, opposing the president on Iran has become a way for Republicans to rally their political base. But that merely brings us to reason number two that the deal is almost certain to pass: The more partisan the opposition to it becomes, the more Democrats rally behind Obama in response.
This is a huge problem for AIPAC. For years, the organization has worked to ensure that both Democrats and Republicans provide the Israeli government unquestioning support. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, by embracing Mitt Romney in 2012, colluding with Republicans to organize a speech to Congress behind Obama’s back this spring and making Ron Dermer, a former GOP operative, his top representative in Washington, has made AIPAC’s work harder.

Quote:AIPAC becoming less effective on US foreign policy: Ex-US senator