Sen. Marco Rubio speaks with reporters in Washington in July. (photo credit: JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS)
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WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans will table legislation for a vote on Monday that would codify a decades-worth of military aid to Israel— and, controversially, facilitate state and local efforts to combat boycotts of the Jewish state.
The bill has received three votes since Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introduced it at the beginning of the new congress. But Democrats, including those supportive of the legislation, said they would not vote to proceed with any legislation of any kind throughout an historic government shutdown that endured through last week.
Now that the shutdown is over, Rubio and his GOP colleagues plan on reintroducing the bill for a cloture vote on Monday evening.
“The Senate will once again move to take up our bill to support Israel, give local and state governments the right to boycott BDS and punish human rights abuses in Syria,” Rubio tweeted, referring to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. “Democrats said they were blocking it until shutdown ended. So no excuse not to move to it now.”
But Rubio’s bill includes different language than an Israel Anti-Boycott Act that was introduced in the last congress, and had attracted bipartisan support.
That legislation had carefully negotiated provisions that assuaged Democratic concerns the bill would infringe on Americans’ constitutional rights to free speech, assembly and boycott.
Supporters of the old legislation say that it built on decades-old, court-tested policy against discriminating on the basis of national origin.
“The bill last year dealt with international organizations boycotting Israel — it extended existing US law on the Arab boycotts,” a Democratic source said. “This bill is very different. It allows state laws to not be preempted by federal law.”
“Neither bill is making the case for these state laws to stand based on First Amendment rights — it’s based on regulations of interstate commerce,” the source said. “Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes these bills, acknowledges that they only challenges the spirit of free speech protections.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, supports both measures and is actively recruiting Democratic votes for its bipartisan passage.
And at least some Democrats are expected to support the legislation. The Jewish Democratic Council for America endorsed the bill on Monday while also castigating GOP members for using Israel as a political foil during the government shutdown.
“JDCA voiced concern that Republicans were politicizing Israel by repeatedly proposing a bill during a shutdown that they know wouldn’t pass,” said Halie Soifer, executive director of the JDCA. “But with the shutdown over, I think we’re going to see a different vote, and JDCA supports S. 1, the reason being that it is consistent with our strong opposition to the BDS movement.”
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