The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Friday the final Iran agreement failed to meet any of the demands Congress made back in March, when 367 members wrote to President Obama to say what the final deal needs to look like.
“Eight-four percent of us in this House signed a letter asking for four critical things in this negotiation,” said Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif, on the House floor.
“We got rolled on every one of the four,” he said. “Iran won on every point.”
The March letter, which was signed by dozens of Democrats, said the final deal has to constrain Iran’s infrastructure, include real transparency measures, be “long-lasting,” and also limit Iran’s destabilizing activities in the region. But Royce said the deal failed on all those points.
“Iran gets to keep its nuclear infrastructure,” he said. “The Obama administration collapsed on the issue of verification. We don’t have anywhere, anytime inspections in here. We’ve got self-inspections by the Iranian regime with respect to Parchin.”
“The sunset clause in this means the key parts of this deal expire at the end of the deal,” he added.
Royce also said the administration failed to rein in Iran’s ability to destabilize the region, by agreeing to language that eases the United Nations’ conventional weapons embargo on Iran in five years, or possibly earlier.
“Unbelievably, we ended up getting rolled on this as well,” he said. His final assessment on the agreement is that it is “very dangerous, very risky,” and said as policy he believes it’s “doomed to fail.”
Royce was talking on the floor in preparation for two votes related to the Iran deal. One is on legislation that would prevent President Obama from lifting Iran sanctions, an attempt to squelch the agreement, and the other is on a resolution approving the deal, which will fail given the strength of GOP opposition.
But Congress at this point seems to be powerless to block the deal. Blocking it would require a resolution of disapproval, but the House as of Friday had no plan to pass that, and a disapproval resolution was filibustered in the Senate by Democrats on Thursday.
