Congress agrees to hold off vote on bipartisan Iran bill
Measure mandating legislators’ review of deal with Tehran will be voted on only after talks’ deadline; Obama to Iran: Rare chance for better ties
Rebecca Shimoni Stoil is the Times of Israel's Washington correspondent.
WASHINGTON — With negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program rushing toward a late-March deadline and a controversial deal taking shape, US legislators stepped up action Thursday to increase their ability to influence the emerging agreement.
A US Senate committee will vote April 14 on a bipartisan measure requiring President Barack Obama to submit any international nuclear deal with Iran for congressional review, the legislation’s authors said.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker and top panel Democrat Robert Menendez agreed to push back a vote on the bill until two weeks beyond the March 31 deadline negotiators set for the outlines of an accord between Iran and world powers, aimed at preventing the Islamic Republic from developing nuclear weapons.
The Obama administration strongly opposes the bill, which would ensure that any impending deal with Iran is subject to Congressional review prior to its final approval. Obama has promised to veto it, as well as any other bill that attempts to tie the hands of US negotiators.
The administration has strived to convince Democratic senators to hold off voting on the bill until after a final agreement is reached with Iran, a perspective also conveyed in a letter that White House Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough wrote to Corker over the weekend. A group of Democrats had indeed warned that they would not vote in support of the bipartisan bill until after March 24, to give the negotiations a chance to succeed.
Thursday’s announcement seemed to present a compromise plan, by which voting would begin after the March 31 deadline for a political framework, but not after the June deadline for a comprehensive agreement.
Congress’s role in finalizing any deal with Iran has come to the forefront of American debate about the ongoing P5+1 nuclear negotiations in recent weeks. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have criticized the administration for allegedly sidestepping the legislature — a critique that increased when reports emerged that any deal would be put before the United Nations Security Council for approval, but not Capitol Hill.
In response, the administration has stressed that the deal will not constitute a legally binding treaty that would require Congressional approval under the Constitution. Congress, stress administration representatives, will ultimately have a vote at the very end of the process, when lawmakers must vote to rescind the crushing sanctions regime that both Congress and the White House agree brought Iran to the negotiations table.
Because of the administration’s adamant opposition, the bill’s sponsors are trying to raise a veto-breaking majority of 67 votes in the Senate to ensure that the legislation can pass into law.
“We have been working together very closely to ensure we have the strongest vote possible on the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act and to achieve that result, we have agreed to a markup of the bill in the Foreign Relations Committee as soon as we return on Tuesday, April 14,” the senators wrote in a statement.
The legislation was coauthored by Senators Corker, Menendez, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Tim Kaine (D-VA) — with the last considered a close administration ally on a number of key issues. Cosponsors include an additional five Democrats, and Republican support for the bill is near-unanimous, meaning that the sponsors only need to enlist some five to seven Democrats to get to the veto-proof status.
But Menendez and Corker were not alone in trying to move their Iran-related legislation forward Thursday. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) reintroduced the Sanction Iran, Safeguard America Act, which would impose additional sanctions against Iran and, according to its sponsors, “help safeguard America in the face of the Obama Administration’s disastrous proposed nuclear deal with Iran.”
The legislation, which does not have Democratic co-sponsors, would reimpose all of the sanctions relaxed under the Joint Plan of Action with Iran; expand sanctions in the petrochemical and automotive sectors; prohibit funding for US negotiations with Iran pending Congressional approval; require Iran to renounce its sponsorship of terror groups such as Hezbollah; and present a path towards the removal of sanctions that includes dismantling Iran’s nuclear program in its entirety; removing all centrifuges, relinquishing enriched uranium, and ceasing all research and development of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program.
The reintroduced legislation also adds a clause stating that any deal that goes through the UN Security Council and is not ratified as a treaty by the Senate or passed into law by Congress has no binding authority on subsequent presidents or congresses.
“By recklessly unraveling the program of international economic sanctions and the coalition that imposed them without ensuring Iran has no path to the bomb, President Obama will only make it more likely that his successor will be forced to use military force because there will be far fewer options at the new president’s disposal,” wrote Cruz shortly after filing the legislation. “But as prime minister Netanyahu said in his powerful speech to Congress on Iran on March 3, the options are not yet the President’s bad deal or war. There is another way. That is why I am reintroducing the Sanction Iran, Safeguard America Act.”
Cruz’s bill — and the companion bill that will be introduced by Franks in the House of Representatives next week — has little to no chance of garnering the kind of bipartisan support that would help it overcome a certain presidential veto.
Also on Thursday, over 360 members of the House prepared a letter to Obama in which they warned that Congress would only release sanctions against Iran when they were convinced that the terms of a deal “foreclose any pathway to a bomb.”
“Should an agreement with Iran be reached, permanent sanctions relief from Congressionally mandated sanctions would require new legislation,” the letter reminded the president, according to the Washington-based The Hill.
One of the letter’s key Democratic backers, Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) warned administration officials during a Thursday morning hearing that “Congress really needs to play a very active and vital role in this whole process, and any attempts to sidestep Congress will be resisted.”
Meanwhile Obama told Iranians Thursday that another moment to pursue better relations between Iran and the US may not come again soon.
Obama was addressing ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran in his annual video message marking Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
Obama said Iran had kept its commitments under the interim nuclear deal. But he said coming days and weeks were critical. He said there were gaps remaining and opponents in both countries who opposed a deal.
Obama said there was a way for Iran to assure the world it doesn’t want nuclear weapons, and that path would lead to greater opportunities for Iranians.
But he stressed that if Iran’s leaders don’t choose that path, Iranians will remain isolated and deprived of global opportunities.
AFP and AP contributed to this report.
