Sen. Tim Kaine is not pleased with his Republican counterparts.
Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who sits on both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Armed Services Committee, has openly opposed additional sanctions against Iran — and a letter sent by 47 Senate Republicans to Iranian leaders is the latest move to upset him.
“I think Republicans have made it harder for us to approach this in a careful and bipartisan way,” Kaine said about a possible Iranian nuclear deal on the Senate floor Tuesday. “I regret that this partisan and nutty behavior makes people focus on politics and not the substance.”
Last week, Kaine denounced how quickly Republicans were pushing a bipartisan bill that would require a congressional review of any nuclear deal with Iran..
Kaine admitted to sharing “many of the concerns” regarding a nuclear deal with Iran with both the47 Republican senators who sent the letter and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But those concerns only go so far, he expressed Tuesday.
“I deeply believe we should not try to tank a deal, critique a deal, undercut a deal, before there is a deal,” he said. “The message that is communicated to the American public and to the world is, ‘we will never accept any deal. We are not interested in diplomacy. We are not interested in negotiation.’ And that attitude plays directly into the hand of the nation of Iran, which is currently engaging in terrorist activity. They would want to be able to blame the absence of any deal on an intransigent United States that is unwilling to negotiate in good faith. We shouldn’t tank a deal before there is a deal.”
Kaine joins a slew of other Democrats — including Vice President Joe Biden — upset over the Republican letter to the leaders of Iran.
