“The Prime Minister may be right. I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, with the deepest sincerity, that I hope and pray that he is right, but I cannot believe what he believes. I wish I could. Therefore, I can be of no assistance to him in his Government. I should be only a hindrance, and it is much better that I should go.”

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Those words were spoken on October 3, 1938, by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, when he resigned from the British government in protest against the pact that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had just struck with Hitler at Munich. We’ve been wondering all week whether there is even one Democrat who is going to go to the mat with President Obama in respect of Iran. Clearly the situations aren’t exactly parallel, even with Mr. Obama’s similarity to Chamberlain; our democracy, for one thing, is not parliamentary. But there are echoes enough that we’d have hoped at least one Democrat would make a clean break with the administration.

There are those who thought it might, finally, be Senator Schumer, but after he offered a few perfunctory protests, the cat has got his tongue. As it did long ago on the Jerusalem embassy question; Mr. Schumer used to boast that the embassy would be moved, then voted for a waiver that every State Department since then has used to conveigle the president to dodge the issue. We saw it again when President Obama put up as his defense nominee Senator Hagel, who had been the most annoying opponent of Israel in the entire upper chamber. Mr. Schumer huffed and puffed and then ran interference for him.

In respect of Iran, the best that the Democrats have put up is Senator Menendez, and we don’t want to gainsay his virtues. He has done in many respects a fabulous job. In the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, he has put up, in combination with Senator Kirk, a shrewd bill that any well-meaning administration would embrace. Nor did that happen by accident; Mr. Menendez was, in his chairmanship of Foreign Relations, one of the architects of the Iran sanctions regime. He has shown that he is a strategic thinker, and we certainly need them in the Senate. He seems to understand Iran’s game — and, for that matter, Mr. Obama’s.

All the greater the blunder when he went onto the floor Thursday to express the “hope that we will not find ourselves in a partisan process trying to force a vote on this national security matter before its appropriate time.” No doubt he wants a vote. But what’s the problem? How many years do we have to dawdle before the Senate finds the right time to stand up? The mullahs have been preparing to put together their bomb for years, and for all the protestations, they are radically closer to being able to do it than they were when President Obama acceded to the White House.

No wonder Mr. Menendez’s cavil about “trying to force a vote” set the left wing columnists to jeering at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. There’s a faction that wants to make Aipac — and Israel — the butt of the Senate’s own inability to stand up to the Iranians or America’s own administration in the chamber of Congress that the Democrats themselves control. Remember, Mr. Menendez’s bill has as sponsors 43 Republicans. It’s not the GOP that’s the problem. How is Mr. Menendez going to win this fight if he goes onto the Senate floor and says, at the outset, as he did Thursday, “I support the Administration’s diplomatic efforts”? Duff Cooper wouldn’t have said that.