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And a number of top Democrats including Vice President Joe Biden, whose job description includes the title President of the Senate won't be attending.

Netanyahu is expected to use the speech to sharply criticize the White House's efforts to negotiate a deal on Iran's nuclear program and to urge Congress to pass new sanctions on the nation, a position that puts him sharply at odds with the president. On Tuesday, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said Netanyahu's decision to speak was "destructive to the fabric of the relationship" between Israel and the U.S.

Related: Tensions rise between Obama, Netanyahu

Related: White House gets confrontational before Netanyahu visit

The expected substance of the speech, coupled with the fact that the White House was not alerted to the invite ahead of time, has Democrats crying foul.

Twenty-seven Democratic House members and four Democratic senators have said in recent weeks they're not going to the speech, many in protest to a move that they say is an affront to the president.

Many more have said they're undecided on whether to attend, and more defections could emerge in the coming days. A full list of the Democrats who have confirmed they're missing the speech follows:

SENATE - 4 members

Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.)

Sen. Patrick Leahy (Vt.)

Continued here:
34 Democrats skipping Netanyahu's speech

Democrats are playing a dangerous game with Israel by snubbing the prime minister of Americas staunchest Middle East ally.

Four Democratic senators, as well as almost two dozen House members, have already announced that they wont attend Benjamin Netanyahus speech to a joint session of Congress on March 3.

By doing so, they may curry favor with the White House, but they risk sending a dangerous message to Israels enemies especially Iran.

As recently as November, Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned that the only cure for Israel is to be annihilated.

Is it any wonder that Netanyahu considers a nuclear-armed Iran an existential threat to Israels very existence?

Israel is the only nation in the world that, from its inception, has been constantly threatened with extinction.

Its Arab neighbors have fought repeated wars to destroy the Jewish state. Terrorist groups have periodically slaughtered Israelis aiming their attacks at innocent civilians, even schoolchildren.

Last year alone, Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets into Israel from Gaza. Only the Iron Dome defense system prevented the rockets from killing hundreds if not thousands of Israelis who were Hamas intended victims.

So why on earth have Democrats chosen to pick this fight?

And make no mistake: It is a handful of Democrats who have turned Netanyahus speech into a partisan issue.

Read more from the original source:
Comforting the enemy: Bottom line of the Bibi boycott

TIME Politics Congress T.J. KirkpatrickGetty Images House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, at center, reads a letter she sent to colleagues in congress, with Democratic leaders including, from left, Rep. Xavier Becerra, Rep. Steny Hoyer, Rep. Joseph Crowley and Rep. Rosa DeLauro at the U.S. Capitol on Feb. 27, 2015 in Washington, DC.

With just hours to go before a midnight deadline, Congress passed a one-week extension to fund the Department of Homeland Security and prevent sending 30,000 government employees home on furlough.

The vote ended a tumultuous day in the House as Republican Speaker John Boehner and his aides lost control of their right flank, failing to deliver a three-week funding measure for the department and relying instead on Democrats to pass the one-week measure to avoid a DHS shutdown.

Boehner had hoped the three-week extension would buy his conference time to figure out how to protest immigration measures put forward by President Obama last year, without shutting down DHS. But his fellow Republicans turned on the bill and it failed by a handful of votes late in the afternoon.

The Senate, led by newly elected Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, then calmly passed a one-week extension of funding for the department and sent that bill back across the Capitol to the House. After House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi spoke with Obama, House Democrats opted to vote with Boehner and the Republican leadership rather than allow funding for the department to fail.

The one-week extension in funding for DHS meant that McConnell could technically uphold his promise that there would be no government shutdowns under his leadership. But House conservatives effectively ended McConnells other major promise as leader: that the party would no longer be scary.

On the Senate side of the Capitol, the House disarray brought scorn from Democrats and Republicans alike. Hopefully were gonna end the attaching of bullshit to essential items of the government, Illinois GOP Sen. Mark Kirk, whos up for reelection in 2016, told TPM. In the long-run, if you are blessed with the majority, youre blessed with the power to govern. If youre gonna govern, you have to act responsibly.

The DHS fight originated in November, when Obama announced he would unilaterally, temporarily defer deportations up to five million immigrants who came to the country illegally. While Republicans in Congress were furious at what they called the unconstitutional action, they were faced with few good options to effectively negate Obamas executive actions.

Their best option emerged last week, when a federal judge in Texas ordered Obama to stop his action through an injunction. Still, some of the top legal experts in the country say the presidents actions are lawful. Some Republicans applauded the three-week plan put forward by Boehner Thursday night, saying that it gave time to highlight the ruling.

America should have an opportunity to understand why we object to the presidents action [and] why a federal judge found that the president didnt have the authority, said California GOP Rep. Darrell Issa. So the Speaker has offered a very reasoned way to create space in which to have that debate with the Senate.

Read this article:
House Democrats Save DHS From Shutdown, Republicans From Themselves

By Zoltan L. Hajnal February 27 at 11:00 AM

Some Republicans are so opposed to immigration reform that they are willing to withhold funding for Department of Homeland Security just to fight back against President Obamas executive order on immigration. To many observers, this in politically foolish. In their minds, the countrys increasing racial diversity makes it risky to oppose immigration reform.

This argument makes some sense. Immigrants and other minorities tend to care a lot about immigration and they tend to favor the Democratic Party on the issue. Recent polls indicate that Latino approval of President Obama went up markedly after he issued his executive order on immigration.

So why dont Republicans get it? The answer is that Republicans opposition to immigration reform actually represents a winning strategy, not a losing one. Heres why.

Republicans win or lose largely depending on white voters. Whites still make up the vast majority of voters some 75 percent in 2014 and whites tend to favor the Republican Party by large margins. Republican congressional candidates garnered 60 percent of the white vote in 2014. All told, 89 percent of all Republican votes in 2014 came from white voters. Put simply, the Republican Party doesnt really need the minority vote.

Moreover, whites also increasingly care about immigration. A new book by Marisa Abrajano and myself reveals the significant impact immigration has had on white party politics.

We find that white views on immigration are correlated with their partisan identity and their electoral choices. In the last midterm, for example, 75 percent of Americans who felt that most illegal immigrants should be deported voted for Republican candidates. By contrast, only 35 percent of those who favored a chance for undocumented immigrants to apply for legal status favored Republicans. As I show in research with Michael Rivera, the relationship between attitudes on immigration and white vote choice holds even after accounting for the other factors that we think affect how people vote.

But does this correlation imply causation? To answer that more difficult question, we looked to see if attitudes on immigration at one point in time predicted changes in partisanship later on. The answer is yes. To be sure, the effect is not large but even small individual shifts in partisanship, once repeated over the course of decades, can become massive electoral shifts over time.

In another study, Marisa Abrajano, Hans Hassell, and I showed that reporting on immigration was associated with shifts in the overall share of white Democrats and white Republicans in the electorate. It does, and to a startling degree. The more media coverage of immigration is negative, the larger the share of white Republicans in the electorate.

By any measure, fears of immigration are driving many white Americans to the Republican Party. And, indeed, the Republican strategy on immigration appears to have been successful. Republicans now control the House and the Senate, the governors office in 31 states, and two-thirds of the state legislatures. They are winning the political war.

See the article here:
Monkey Cage: Opposition to immigration reform is a winning strategy for Republicans

MIAMI, FL - FEBRUARY 09: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks with the media after delivering remarks during the graduation of small business owners from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program held at the Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College on February 9, 2015 in Miami, Florida. The Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program helps owners in the Greater Miami area by providing them with greater access to business education, financial capital and business support services. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Joe Raedle, Getty Images

Marco Rubio has already apologized to the right wing base for his one-time support of comprehensive immigration reform, but two years later at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Republicans are still bringing up the immigration "mistake" he made in the Senate.

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"You went forward with your immigration proposal, and at the end of the day you said, 'It didn't work. I tried...it's not going to work,'" Fox News' Sean Hannity said in a sit-down interview with the Florida senator at the conference.

Rubio insisted that his original plan was, in fact, "the single biggest lesson of the last two years."

"Well, it wasn't very popular. I don't know if you know that from some of the folks here," Rubio said in a joking aside.

The immigration plan that Hannity referenced was a 2013 immigration reform bill that Rubio played a key role in pushing. The legislation would have tightened border security, reworked the national visa program, and offered a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

It's not exactly the sort of pitch that plays well at CPAC, the right wing's Super Bowl equivalent -- even two years later when the senator is considering a 2016 presidential run. And amidst the threat of a DHS shutdown because of President Obama's executive actions on immigration, it's a knock against Rubio's conservative bona fides.

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Marco Rubio answers for his failed 2013 immigration plans -- again