The not-Israel lobby

The Armenian lobby looks to be not nearly as powerful as that other lobby.

House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution backed by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago....

Until Tuesday, the measure appeared on a path to House passage, with strong support from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was approved last week by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. But by Tuesday evening, a group of senior House Democrats had made it known that they were planning to ask the leadership to drop plans for a vote on the measure.

This has been an extremely clumsy ordeal, and it would be nice if it died a quiet, lonely death. But the real lesson here is that it's good when an interest group's influence--however outsized--is not so great that its bad policy ideas become, de facto, the standard operating procedures of the United States government.