President Obama’s plan to use executive actions and national security waivers to suspend sanctions on Iran are becoming the next battleground in his quest for a nuclear deal — and the virtually unprecedented move could end up sinking the deal.
“It’s one of the few arms control agreements in history where Congress has not played a meaningful role,” Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told the Washington Examiner.
Top Democratic critics of the Obama administration’s handling of the talks with Tehran say the regime of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is very concerned that the next U.S. president could overturn or significantly alter any agreement not ratified by Congress.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., doubts Tehran would sign off on any waiver-dependent deal.
“I don’t think Tehran would sign a deal without permanent sanctions unless they were changed in some regard because a new president could get rid of them,” he said.
A group of GOP senators drove that point home Monday in an open letter to the Iranian leadership. Obama will be leaving office in less than two years, while many of them will still be in the Senate and could reverse any deal negotiated.
The White House and many Democrats on Capitol Hill were incensed at such an open and direct GOP effort to influence the talks before a self-imposed March 24 deadline, but the message from Republicans was loud, clear and largely true.
If the next president is a Republican, that person will most likely have campaigned on promises to reverse the deal and could follow through after taking office — with bipartisan backing from Congress.
The kind of unilateral action the president seems to have in mind is rare in arms control agreements. The Senate, for instance, was directly involved in an intense and prolonged debate over both Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties between the U.S. and post-Soviet Russia and ratified the most recent such treaty in January 2011.
The Obama administration is counting on its international partnership with the U.K., Germany, France, Russia and China to help pressure the next administration and Congress to keep the deal intact or jeopardize America’s reputation for maintaining lasting international agreements.
But defense experts point out that Obama’s decision to cut Congress out of the deal has ramifications beyond Obama’s ongoing competition with Republican lawmakers.
A contingent of Democrats, including Schumer and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., have tried to keep the pressure on Iran by backing legislation that would automatically impose new business and trade restrictions on Iran if no deal is reached by this summer’s deadline or if Iran breaks the agreement in any way.
Other senators support a separate bipartisan bill requiring that Obama submit the language of the deal to Congress to approve or disapprove.
Menendez and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the bill’s lead sponsors, argue that such congressional involvement could serve to strengthen any strong agreement with Tehran as well as unravel a weak deal completely.
“If they went through this process where they actually brought it to Congress and Congress passed muster on it, it really would be a much more settled issue,” Corker told Bloomberg News in late February.
Most Republicans and several Democrats speculate that Obama has left Congress out of any role in the deal out of fear that they would react with knee-jerk disapproval, but they say it is a mistake to view Congress’s involvement that way.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has suggested that Republicans are simply trying to help the administration negotiate a better deal now as opposed to working to overturn it once the agreement is inked.
Other Democrats argue that the White House just wants to finish the negotiations before allowing Congress to begin meddling.
“The White House has always understood that at one point Congress would weigh in, but that’s the way it ought to happen — we have to let the negotiators negotiate and then Congress can weigh in,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “My hope is that these negotiations will move forward and reach an air-tight, comprehensive, long-lasting, and most important, verifiable agreement.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., is crafting an Iran-related bill aimed at stripping the Obama administration of its power at the negotiating table. The bill would limit the president’s ability to use national security waivers to eliminate sanctions and would restrict the Treasury Department from issuing licenses for companies to engage in business with Iran.
Royce, and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs panel, penned a letter to Obama on Tuesday arguing that a lasting and legitimate deal with Tehran must pass Congressional muster.
“Should an agreement with Iran be reached, permanent sanctions relief from congressionally mandated sanctions would require new legislation,” they wrote. “In reviewing such an agreement, Congress must be convinced that its terms foreclose any pathway to a bomb, and only then will Congress be able to consider permanent sanctions relief.”
