What Would Ed Koch Do? <br>That Emerges as Question <br>For New York Democrats

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What would Ed Koch do? As President Obama scrambles for a deal with the Iranian mullahs, what would we be hearing from the last Democrat to get re-elected as mayor of this town? And where are the New York Democrats today?

The question was sent to me in an overnight email from one of Koch’s old political allies, Andrew Wolf. He edits the Riverdale Review in The Bronx. We share an affection for the Democratic Party’s conservative remnant.

“Koch would have been relentless in his criticism of Obama,” Mr. Wolf wrote. “Support of Israel was one of the pillars of his belief system. He was New York’s ultimate ‘Democrat with Sanity,’ unafraid to cross party lines.”

What a silence among the local Democrats today. Had Koch been alive, he’d have been marching in front of the United Nations, whose five leading countries are at the center of the current appeasement. There’s none like him today.

New York state’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, attended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the Congress but favors a diplomatic deal.

The one New York Democrat (stretching the term) who may run for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has also supported Obama’s negotiations with Iran.

Mrs. Clinton wants to restore the “special relationship” between Israel and America, she says, and good for her. But she’s hors de combat in the immediate fray — and offers no defense of Israel’s elected prime minister. She’ll be lucky to avoid contempt of Congress in the scandal of her wiped emails.

We’ve heard precious little on Israel from Mayor de Blasio, too, one way or another. He came up through solidarity with Nicaraguan Marxists, including during the 1980s when they were friendly with the Palestinian foes of Israel.

No doubt Mr. de Blasio has evolved on this issue (he is due to travel to Jerusalem in the summer). But no one is holding his breath for Mr. de Blasio to make a Koch-type New York protest in the hour of appeasement.

Which brings us to Schumer agonistes. It seems Chuck Schumer, our senior senator, is caught between, on the one hand, his oft-proclaimed support for the Jewish state and, on the other hand, his ambition to be the Democratic leader in the upper chamber.

Ed Koch would have made that choice in a New York nano-second. He’d have elbowed his way in front of every TV camera, clambered onto every soapbox and marched up every avenue to protest an agreement to manage Iran’s timetable to an A-bomb.

Koch, who knew Congress well (he once served in it), would not have been fooled by Schumer’s emergence as a co-sponsor of a bill to require congressional review of any deal with Iran. Mr. Schumer only signed up for that fight late last month.

The bill he’s co-sponsoring turns out to be weak beer. It is being pushed by Senator Corker, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. The idea is to require that Congress get a chance to weigh in on any agreement.

What the bill actually does is shift the burden in President Obama’s favor. The way you’d think it would work is that a deal gets sent to Congress. If it votes yes, the deal goes through. If it takes no action or votes no, the deal doesn’t go through.

The Schumer-Corker bill gives away the game in advance. It basically says that Obama can lift Iran sanctions unless the Congress nixes the idea. To do that, opponents of the Obama-Kerry-Iran pact would have to get a veto-proof majority (meaning two-thirds of each house).

In other words, the Democratic minority decides.

There was a time when such a circumstance wouldn’t be all that worrying. That was before the Democratic Party dropped from its platform the plank referring to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (and had to have a convention floor fight to reinstate it, as happened in 2012).

It was a time, for that matter, when one might have counted on a Democratic president — or another New York Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — to protect Israel at the United Nations. The UN, after all, midwifed the birth of the Jewish state.

The vote took place in 1947 at the Long Island village of Lake Success. You can still get there. Drive up Third Avenue and, at 59th Street, hang a right and cross into the past via the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.

This column first appeared in the New York Post.


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