The House on Thursday passed a bill barring the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Iran until $46 billion in judgments are paid to victims of terrorist acts by its Shiite Islamic theocracy.
The legislation, which passed 251-173, is the latest in a series of moves by congressional Republicans to inject issues they feel the Obama administration should have raised with Tehran in two years of talks focused strictly on limiting the regime’s nuclear ambitions.
It would bar President Obama from waiving U.S. sanctions as agreed under the deal until all judgments are paid to some 1,300 victims and their families who have sued Iran in U.S. courts.
On Sept. 11, the House passed a bill that would remove Obama’s authority to suspend sanctions against Iran through the end of his term. Companion bills by Sen. Ted Cruz and his fellow Texas Republican, House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, have been introduced that would call on the State Department to declare Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization.
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Iran is considered a state sponsor of terrorism, and the IRGC, as an arm of that state, is sanctioned under that authority, but most of those sanctions are likely to come off as a result of the nuclear agreement. The Obama administration has resisted specifically designating the organization as a terrorist group, even though it has been blamed for many of the attacks against Americans.
None of the bills has a good chance of getting votes in the Senate, where Democrats have mostly banded together to protect the president’s signature foreign policy achievement.
Supporters of the legislation passed Thursday argued that it would maintain U.S. leverage over the more than $100 billion in Iranian assets frozen worldwide to ensure the judgments are paid, saying they would never be paid if those funds are released as specified in the nuclear agreement reached July 14 in Vienna.
“We have a moral obligation to ensure that these judgments for these victims, which represent Iran’s legal debt to the victims of its official policy of terrorism, are paid,” said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif. “And this legislation helps us to fulfill that moral obligation.”
GOP Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado, a former Marine who served in Lebanon, became emotional as he argued in support of the bill on behalf of former comrades among the 241 U.S. service members killed in the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing of their barracks in Beirut by the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah.
“To my friends who died there … today is your day – your day for justice,” Coffman said.
But Democrats called the latest move a “charade,” saying it would set up a Catch-22 that would ensure Iran is unable to pay the judgments, pointing out that all but about $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds are in banks outside the reach of the U.S. government.
“We all feel the same way: Iran is a bad actor and must be held accountable. But this bill is not the correct mechanism to do so,” said Eliot Engel of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and one of several Democrats who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.
