Vowing to cancel President Obama’s budding nuclear deal with Iran is rapidly becoming a key political litmus test for the Republican 2016 contenders.
Most of the likely GOP presidential candidates have expressed concern about the direction of Obama’s negotiations with Tehran, signaling opposition to any agreement that is not ratified by the Senate or approved in some fashion by the Republican-controlled Congress. Now the party’s White House hopefuls are taking their opposition further, promising to kill the proposed accord with their executive authority should they succeed Obama as president in 2017.
“I am challenging every Republican candidate to say the following: ‘I would not honor any deal with the Iranians negotiated by President Obama that was not approved by Congress,'” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is considering a White House bid, told reporters on Tuesday.
Graham’s challenge was hardly necessary.
Already on board are the three other Republican senators eying a White House bid: Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida. Four more possible GOP presidential candidates — former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin — confirmed that they, too, would be willing to kill what Obama presumably intends to tout as one of his major foreign policy achievements. Republican operatives monitoring the primary expect more candidates to follow suit.
“If President Obama signs an agreement that the Congress cannot support, our next president should not be bound by it,” Perry said in video posted on his Facebook page Thursday.
“Unless the White House is prepared to submit the Iran deal it negotiates for congressional approval, the next president should not be bound [by] it,” added Walker, in a statement issued Tuesday evening.
Foreign policy and national security have emerged as potent issues in the 2016 GOP primary, driving interest among grassroots conservatives and major Establishment donors. Their anxiety over Obama’s Iran deal is running particularly high, with concerns centering around provisions that might allow Tehran to pursue nuclear weapons after 10 years, while providing immediate sanctions relief without forcing the regime to renounce terrorism.
Cruz, Graham, Paul and Rubio joined 43 other Senate Republicans in signing an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal not approved by Congress would be deemed illegitimate and subject to cancelation by Obama’s successor. The letter also has attracted the support of two likely GOP presidential candidates from the ranks of the governors, including Jindal and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Jindal encouraged all White House aspirants to sign onto the letter; Bush blamed Obama for forcing Senate Republicans to play hardball.
Drafted by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the missive generated a sharp rebuke from Senate Democrats and the administration, as well as likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. During a news conference to address the scandal surrounding her email practices while she served as Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton suggested that Republicans were providing aide and comfort to the enemy.
“Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander in chief,” she said.
“The Senators are reacting to reports of a bad deal that will likely enable Iran to become a nuclear state over time,” Bush countered, in a statement provided by his spokesman. “They would not have been put in this position had the Administration consulted regularly with them rather than ignoring their input.”
This uproar obscured the fact that Obama’s Iran deal was already on thin ice with 2016 Republicans long before Cotton’s letter. For months, most in the field of likely candidates have trashed it publicly. Last month — long before Cotton’s letter existed — prospective candidates began expressing a willingness to cancel the agreement outright as one of their first acts in the Oval Office.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner more than 10 days ago, Rubio laid out the predicate for the next president to junk Obama’s Iran deal. Obama himself provides a precedent for such action. Soon after taking office in 2009, Obama canceled U.S. missile defense installations planned for Poland and the Czech Republic that were negotiated by President George W. Bush.
“I anticipate that no matter what the deal is, within the presidency of the next person in that office, they’re going to face an Iran that will have violated significant terms of the agreement, will continue to move forward on its long range missile capabilities, will continue to sponsor terrorism around the globe and will continue to destabilize its neighbors,” Rubio said.
