by Richard Baehr
If this does not sound like a resounding victory to you, that is because it isn't one.
The votes are in, and
supporters of the Iran deal appear to have won a big victory in the U.S.
Congress. The Corker-Cardin legislation set up a process whereby the
Iran deal would be handled as an executive agreement rather than a
treaty, and as a result, deal opponents would have needed two-thirds of
both the Senate and the House of Representatives to secure a victory
(meaning a rejection of the deal), through an override of an Obama veto
of their initial rejection of the agreement.
How did the deal
opponents do? In the Senate, 58 of the 100 senators announced their
opposition to the agreement -- all 54 Republicans and 4 Democrats. Some
42 Democrats announced their support for the deal. To protect President
Barack Obama from the humiliation of having to veto an initial rejection
of the agreement (his self-described signature foreign policy and
second-term "achievement"), Democratic senators filibustered and refused
to allow a vote on the deal itself. But in the vote on cloture -- the
attempt to cut off debate so that there would be a vote on the agreement
itself, the 42 Democrats in the president's corner held together and
prevented that vote. Of course, every vote on the cloture resolution was
the same as the announced support or rejection of the deal by senators
before the discussions before the actual vote began. So it is not as if
we did not know where every senator stood on the deal.
In the House of
Representatives, Speaker John Boehner, aware that the Democrats would
filibuster in the Senate and thereby prevent a vote in both houses of
Congress to reject the agreement, shifted the vote from one rejecting
the deal (as outlined in the Corker bill) to one supporting the deal.
That vote showed 162 Democrats in favor of the agreement and 269 House
members opposed (25 Democrats and 244 Republicans).
Combining the two
houses of Congress, 204 Democrats supported the agreement, and 327 House
and Senate members rejected it (29 Democrats and 298 Republicans). So,
this is the Obama victory about which the administration was crowing:
327 members of Congress (62%) opposing the deal, and 204 members (38%)
supporting it. If this does not sound like a resounding victory to you,
that is because it isn't one.
Consider also, that the
administration, via Secretary of State John Kerry, publicly stated that
it did not submit the Iran deal to the Senate for ratification as a
treaty (even though the changes to previous arms control treaties in the
new agreement and the overall significance of the Iran agreement would
have certainly justified that approach), because the votes were not
there for approval. That turned out to be a significant understatement,
of course. A treaty requires two-thirds of senators voting for approval,
or 67 of the 100. So the Obama team only missed by 25 Senate votes the
number needed for a treaty approval, or a 40% shortfall.
Also worth considering
is the party breakdown on the vote in both the House of Representatives
and the Senate. The president, despite major efforts with several
Republican senators and House members, could not persuade a single one
to endorse the deal. On the other hand, despite intense lobbying by the
president, Secretary Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and numerous
outside pro-Iran, anti-Israel, pro-peace groups and other left-wing
groups as well as congressional "whips" in the Senate and the House
(most notably Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi of California), 29 Democrats strayed and showed enough
independence of judgment to reject the agreement. What this means is
that support for the agreement was entirely partisan, as it was for
Obamacare in 2010, with only Democrats in line to do the
administration's bidding. But opposition to the agreement was
bipartisan, with over 12% of Democrats and 100% of Republicans rejecting
the deal.
To overcome a
presidential veto would have required 43 House Democrats and 13 Senate
Democrats to vote no. That was a tall order in each House, requiring
almost a fourth of the Democrats in Congress overall to oppose a
president of their party.
There are other signs
that the president’s "victory" may be a pyrrhic one. There is enormous
interest in the Republican Party's nominating process, in large part due
to some unconventional candidates in the field, Donald Trump most
prominently. At each of the first two debates, watched by enormous TV
audiences of well over 20 million each time, the Iran deal has been
attacked by many of the contenders in an articulate and very specific
fashion. The criticisms (all of them pretty much justified) have
included that the administration oversold the deal, deliberately misled
Congress and the public about side agreements between Iran and the IAEA
and basically caved into Iranian demands in the last few weeks of
negotiations in every major area from our earlier announced positions
(supposed red lines), due to Obama's eagerness to secure the agreement.
Is Iran cut off from
all pathways to a nuclear bomb? The president himself has acknowledged
that there will be no limits on Iran after a period of years specified
in the agreement. But in the earlier years of the agreement, breakout
only requires that Iran decides to cheat, as it has done routinely in
the past. The supposed extension of the breakout time -- 3 months
pre-agreement to a year after implementation of the agreement -- may
overstate the reality of the extension of time achieved, given that Iran
will retain all its centrifuges (and be allowed to upgrade them in a
few years), can continue to run a third of the centrifuges, retains its
processed fuel (though in a different chemical state), maintains all of
its known nuclear facilities (as well as perhaps others we do not know
exist). If the Iranians cheat, what happens? That depends on whether
anyone calls them on it, and even then, on the agreement of at least 5
parties to the deal to take action (pretty unlikely, in other words,
with the Teheran bazaar having been opened to business for the P5+1
members). So much for the snapback of sanctions.
If sanctions were
restored, how big a deal would this be? Maybe not much, given the
grandfathering of sanctions relief for companies which have made deals
with Iran before any violations were identified and any action taken.
Even more important, the money released to the mullahs -- up to $150
billion -- might all be in their terror funding bank accounts by the
time the parties to the Iran deal decided to take action, causing more
Iranian-directed mayhem in Israel, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and maybe
places further afield.
The Obama
administration secured fewer than 40% of members of Congress to back the
agreement, but some polls suggest that among the American population
the support level for the deal is barely half of that -- in the 20%
range. That is below even the meager support which Obamacare has
mustered at any time since its passage. And unlike the Iran deal,
Obamacare needed a positive majority vote to pass the health care reform
package. In the administration's Iran deal win, victory was achieved by
not losing as decisively as required for the agreement to be rejected
(only 62% opposed, instead of 67%).
One might argue that
the administration avoided a huge defeat by its lobbying effort, but has
nonetheless lost the argument in the court of public opinion, and among
the majority of the Congress. And just like with Obamacare, opponents
are not going away. There may be continued and regular congressional
action demanding new sanctions, challenges in court on whether the
Corker bill's 60-day review clock ever really started since the side
agreements were never submitted for review and continued trashing of the
accord by Republican presidential contenders. Virtually all of the
Democrats in Congress who supported the president issued statements
about the many things that did not satisfy them in the agreement and
other steps that might need to be taken to help our allies. This
suggests that the misgivings about Kerry's surrender to his negotiating
counterparts were in fact very bipartisan. With Trump regularly
trumpeting that America keeps losing, that we get beaten by Mexico and
China and Iran, this has become a widespread perception and will remain
so, regardless of Trump's future success (or lack thereof) in the
nominating process.
One other fallout of
the Iran review process is that mainstream Jewish organizations --
Jewish federations in major cities, the American Jewish Congress, the
Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
all opposed the agreement. The administration could find fewer than 5%
of America's rabbis to sign onto a letter supporting the agreement.
While a majority of American Jews remain liberal Democrats, American
Jews who care about Israel are now increasingly alienated from Obama. If
the survival of Israel is issue No. 10 in the constellation of things
to worry about for some Jews (after preserving abortion rights,
defending Planned Parenthood, saving the planet from climate change and
battling income inequality), supporting the president on this deal was a
no-brainer for them. That is because, for most of this crowd, no brain
time was devoted to consideration of the deal that had just been agreed
to. For those Jews who took this agreement very seriously, however, the
verdict was overwhelmingly negative.
During the last Republican
debate, one of the contenders mentioned that there were no countries
where America is better regarded and respected today than it was before
Obama took office. That may not be true -- Iran and Cuba might qualify,
at least on the street. But do the Cuban leaders or the Iranian mullahs
respect Obama more? They might, if you gain respect for a baby after
taking its candy. Most Americans have also concluded the Iran agreement
was a one-sided deal and we lost. If a different political party gets to
occupy the White House in January 2017, it might well be that this Iran
agreement and the weakness it conveyed about Obama and the Democrats'
foreign policy had a lot to do with it.
Richard Baehr
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=13783
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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