Congress is moving quickly to respond to President Obama’s controversial cash payment to Iran, in a bid to highlight the move in the final stretch of the election.
In the three days since Congress returned to Washington for a four-week legislative sprint, new bills prohibiting any similar payments from the U.S. to Iran have attracted dozens of co-sponsors. And in the wake of anger that the first $400 million payment looked like ransom to free four U.S. hostages, the GOP has plans to move at least one of them.
By Friday, a bill from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce to prohibit future “ransom payments” to Iran had attracted 36 Republican co-sponsors. And Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., agreed to squeeze a House floor vote on the measure into an already crowded September legislative calendar.
Republican lawmakers know there’s no chance that the president will sign it into law in the waning days of his time in office. Instead, they want to highlight the controversial cash payments and force Democrats up for election in conservative states to take a tough vote on the measure.
“The administration’s actions put American lives in jeopardy,” Royce said in a statement. “That’s why the committee is working on legislation that would prevent another ransom payment from happening. No more hidden cash payments to this state sponsor of terrorism.”
Several weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal first reported that the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement payment to Iran was made in cash, and delivered the same day Tehran freed four American prisoners. The cash payment was made to resolve an outstanding debt it owed Iran. In the last 1970s before the fall of the Shah, Iran had paid the U.S. the money to buy military equipment, and it has remained all of these years in a New York bank.
A few weeks later, it was discovered that the entire payment was made with cash, raising more fears that the Obama administration was giving Iran an easy way to fund terrorist activities around the world.
On the Senate side, the path for a similar bill written by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is less clear, although it has Republican senators scrambling to sign onto it.
In just three days, 20 GOP senators have agreed to co-sponsor the measure, a diverse group including Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the Senate majority whip; House Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina; Susan Collins of Maine; Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire; and Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
“President Obama may have attempted to appease our enemy with pallets of cash secretly delivered on an unmarked cargo plane, but Iran continues to cheat on the nuclear deal, harass our military, hold Americans hostage, and fund terrorism around the world,” Rubio said in a statement. “Iran should be held accountable, and the Obama administration’s misguided policies must be stopped.”
Rubio’s bill is competing with another being pushed by Sen. Bob Corker, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Corker’s bill, introduced in July and co-sponsored by Rubio, as well as Democratic Sens. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Joe Manchin of West Va., takes a broader approach. Dubbed the Countering Iranian Threats Act of 2016, it expands sanctions on Tehran for ballistic missile development, support for terrorism and other illicit Iranian actions, and provides new sanctions for the transfer of conventional weapons to and from Iran, among other penalties.
But Corker’s legislation has just eight co-sponsors, and only one new sponsor signed on this week in the wake of new revelations about the cash payments to Iran. For that reason, the momentum appears to be on the side of Rubio’s more targeted measure with the House poised to quickly move similar legislation.
Still, Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., said he decided to co-sponsor Corker’s bill this week because it punishes Iran for continuing to pursue activities that violate international law, including ballistic missile testing and funding terrorism.
“Iran continues to pose a serious danger to the United States and our allies, and President Obama seems content to allow the Iranians to promote and engage in activities that threaten what little stability there is in the Middle East,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“It is our duty to hold Iran accountable for its behavior and ensure that we are pursuing policies that will deter Iran from engaging in ballistic missile testing or supporting terrorist groups and punish them when they do so,” he said.
