On Wednesday, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., announced her support for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. This was significant because she is the 34th senator to announce she would be voting for it.
This means that even if the Senate manages to pass a bill blocking the deal later this month, it will lack the two-thirds support necessary to override a presidential veto.
Some have asserted that this means Obama got his Iran deal through Congress. That isn’t quite accurate, though. What Obama has done is get his Iran deal around Congress. Lawmakers may not be able to stop it based on the procedure they created to express approval or disapproval, but the deal does not enjoy support on Capitol Hill, nor among the American public.
Despite an extensive and expensive effort to lobby lawmakers and the public, Obama’s Iran deal still faces majority opposition in both chambers of Congress. A majority of the public, according to two recent polls by respected pollsters (CNN and Quinnipiac), wants Congress to reject the deal.
This means that Obama will get his deal despite lacking not only the supermajority support that is typically required for a treaty with a foreign country, but also a bare majority or public approval. Whatever one has to say about previous major foreign policy decisions, very few are undertaken under such circumstances as this. Even the Iraq War, a much larger undertaking for the U.S. and very unwise in the opinion of many, was only engaged after very broad public support had been established and Congress provided an affirmative vote for authorizing military force.
Obama secured a deal whose terms are generous toward Iran, light on verification and not terribly reassuring toward Arab and Israeli allies in the region. Having obtained and announced this deal, Obama chose to take it to the United Nations immediately rather than to Congress. The entire point was to use the international body to force the hand of America’s elected lawmakers. It sets a terrible precedent, because American presidents, as much latitude as the Constitution gives them in conducting the foreign policy of the United States, are not given a blank check to make that policy up as they go along. Matters of such great importance to world affairs as the potential proliferation of nuclear arms in the Middle East deserve the full deliberation of both elected branches of government.
Americans famously say that politics ends at the water’s edge. But the main reason this saying exists is that few presidents have been so foolish as to act unilaterally on a matter of such significance, as Obama has done this summer.
Congress made a big mistake this spring in establishing a procedure that requires a two-thirds vote to stop Obama from just doing whatever he wants. No other legislative process works this way. Unfortunately, this was the toughest procedure Congress could pass in the Iran Review Act, because Democratic partisanship in the Senate placed the political protection of their party’s president above all other considerations. World peace, the common good and Congress’s institutional integrity took a back seat to a temporary boost for Obama’s legacy.
Regardless of the outcome of the Iran deal, it never should have become reality like this, and it never should again. Voters should demand that every presidential candidate for 2016 promise to work with Congress to a reasonable extent when conducting foreign policy, rather than using international institutions to pull a fast one on the American people.
