With Democrats now accusing Republican senators of “treason” for expressing public disagreement with President Obama’s Iran policy, it is difficult to imagine that the divisive politics in Washington could get much worse.
But sadly, it’s not impossible.
Reuters reported last week that major world powers led by the Obama administration “have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal.” This has now been confirmed by the White House.
On Saturday, the Huffington Post published a letter that Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, sent to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, who has proposed bipartisan legislation that would ensure Congressional approval of any deal. Obama has threatened to veto the bill, and the McDonough letter reiterated this opposition. McDonough also wrote that, “The United Nations Security Council will also have a role to play in any deal with Iran. Just as it is true that only Congress can terminate U.S. statutory sanctions on Iran, only the Security Council can terminate the Security Council’s sanctions on Iran. Because the principal negotiators of an arrangement with Iran are the five permanent members of the Security Council, we anticipate that the Security Council would pass a resolution to register its support for any deal and increase its international legitimacy.”
Should Obama decide to pursue this route, it would be despicable. He would be enlisting foreign governments to work against the nearly unanimous will of Americans’ elected representatives, who wholeheartedly backed sanctions. This would not only undermine the rule of law, but it also hints that worse is still to come. After all, Obama would not feel compelled to circumvent Congress’s constitutional treaty and spending powers if he felt that he was getting a good deal from the Iranians that he could actually sell even to skeptical Senate Democrats. In reality, the deal being negotiated would leave Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact. It would make major concessions on uranium enrichment, plutonium development, and missile technology. It would unravel sanctions as thousands of centrifuges would be left spinning, and it would have sunset clause in a decade that would make it easy for the terrorist sponsoring regime to become a nuclear power.
The White House has recently been pushing the line that the U.S. government must speak with one unified voice on Iran. Patriotism supposedly demands no less – at least when Obama is president. But Obama guaranteed that the U.S. government would not speak with one voice when he leaked his plans to shield his Iran deal from congressional scrutiny. The White House’s plan, announced earlier this year, is to circumvent Congress by simply avoiding any binding, long-term deal that would require Senate ratification.
The going plan is for Obama to make a short-term deal, then use his authority under current sanctions legislation to extend temporary relief to Iran – and to keep extending that relief indefinitely, as if it were permanent. In short, Obama has found an interesting loophole that allows him to do more by doing less.
Even so, this plan is impractical from Obama’s perspective because it depends on the election of a like-minded successor. And so to deal with this contingency, he could use the United Nations to make it more difficult for a Republican successor to reverse his unilateral policy toward a nation that openly loathes America and her allies and seeks nuclear weapons as a means of expanding its influence.
The history of the existing Iran sanctions law makes clear what is really going on here. Obama is working to undermine the principle behind the lawful and duly enacted U.S. sanctions policy that Congress passed with veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress. Obama opposed and worked against the policy at the time, but he signed it anyway because Congress — at the time with one house under Democratic control — would have otherwise overridden his veto.
American sovereignty and the rule of law depend on universal respect for institutions that Obama has repeatedly disrespected. His plot to enlist foreign aid against a coequal branch of the U.S. government would represent just one more slight among the many he has delivered against Congress – many of which have resulted in his being reprimanded by the Supreme Court for claiming power that is not his own.
If a power-hungry president feels slighted when Congress asserts its constitutional role in foreign policy, perhaps that is because he deserves to feel slighted.
