Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said it’s “shameful” that some lawmakers are planning to boycott the congressional address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose invitation from House Speaker John Boehner was seen by some in Congress as a political stunt.
In an interview Thursday with the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Rubio said that “absolutely” Netanyahu should address a joint session of Congress, as the prime minister is scheduled to do next month. According to The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication, more than a dozen representatives and senators have declared they will not attend the speech.
“I think it’s shameful that people have decided to boycott him,” Rubio said in an interview that also addressed his views on presidential authorization for military action against the Islamic State, as well as his own presidential ambitions.
The West Miami Republican continued: “I wish they would put themselves in his position. He has a country fighting for their right to exist. This is a country whose very existence is being threatened by Iran. . . . He needs to do everything he can to protect his country, and we – as Israel’s strongest and most important ally – should do everything we can to support him.”
Boycotting Netanyahu’s speech, Rubio said, “sends a terrible message to the Middle East.”
As for President Barack Obama’s request to Congress for authorization to fight Islamic State terrorists in Iraq, Syria and beyond without ruling out ground troops, Rubio said the president should be given that authority.
He said he saw Obama as having the authority to do so now, without congressional approval.
“I think the ideal outcome is for Congress to give the president the authority to continue this campaign,” said Rubio, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “But I think it should be a very simple authorization.”
The Rubio proposal: “We should authorize the president to take whatever military steps are necessary to destroy ISIS and defeat them militarily.”
That, he said, would “allow the commander-in-chief – the one we have now and the one we have in the future – to work with military experts.”
The size of any U.S. ground forces would be up to those experts, he said. For now, Rubio wants more special operations forces “for the purpose of logistics, targeting, training and intelligence gathering.”
Ideally, the United States would be joined by Egypt, Turkey, the Kurds, Jordan, and the Gulf kingdoms “to put together a coalition of ground forces to go in on the ground and defeat ISIS.”
That could mean going beyond Iraq and Syria and into Libya and Afghanistan.
Rubio would not talk numbers of troops, only that the size of the force should be “a military decision, not a domestic political one.”
As for his own presidential plans, Rubio said he would decide “soon” whether he plans to formally join the race for the 2016 Republican nomination.