White House whips Senate allies to block Armenian genocide resolution

The White House succeeded today in keeping the Senate from recognizing the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of more than 1 million mostly Christian Armenians as a genocide. Al-Monitor has learned that the Trump administration mustered its Republican allies for the third time in a month to block the Senate from passing a resolution that Turkey vehemently opposes.

And while President Donald Trump seeks to salvage the troubled US-Turkish alliance, he’s slowly running out of Senate allies willing to take the political hit for blocking the resolution.

Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, attempted to get their Armenian genocide resolution passed unanimously on the Senate floor today — only to have their efforts thwarted by Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., who blocked the legislation at the White House’s behest. Menendez, however, vowed to “keep calling up the resolution every week until it passes.”

“I’m not going to stop until I go through every single senator who’s willing to come to the floor and issue an objection on behalf of the administration,” Menendez said. “Because I think Armenian-Americans need to know who stands in support of recognizing the genocide, who opposes that.”