Jim Rosica
Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater Thursday compared Democratic members of the U.S. Senate to the man who ordered the execution of Jesus Christ for obstructing a vote on the pending nuclear deal with Iran.
In an blistering statement, he said, “History will remember them as the cowards who abdicated their duty to vote on one of the most important issues of our time.”
The agreement, worked out between Iran and a group of world powers including the United States, will limit Iran’s ability to use nuclear technology in return for lifting financial and other sanctions against the country.
On Tuesday, Senate Democrats again blocked a vote on a resolution to reject the deal, according to an Associated Press report. The deal was described as President Barack Obama‘s “key foreign policy initiative.”
“To impede so much as a vote on the deal, a group of senators demonstrated a most detestable form of cowardice in banding together to filibuster,” Atwater said in a statement. “Like several reincarnations of Pontius Pilate, they acknowledged the difficulty of the decision at hand but ultimately chose to wash their hands of the responsibility of making it.”
Earlier this month, Atwater wrote to legislative leaders to urge them to “protect and preserve our divestment policies.”
Florida passed a law “requiring divestment of public funds from companies that do business with Iran,” said Atwater, a former bank executive. He co-sponsored the measure in 2007 while in the Florida Senate.
Atwater, like many Republicans, opposes dealing with a state that is a “sponsor of terror.”
The Democratic senators behind the move “reduced themselves – and arguably an entire branch of government – to the insignificance of white noise,” he said Thursday.
“With their audacious avoidance, they have become the elevator music of government: Electing irrelevance, eliciting ridicule, embracing triviality,” Atwater said. “Americans deserve discourse, debate and decisions from those who were elected to represent us.”
