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This is why I believe we are in deep trouble:
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Day late, dollar short always comes after the fact:
Joe Biden Shouldn’t
Return to the Iran Deal
By REUEL MARC GERECHT & MARK DUBOWITZ
Although President Biden has demanded that Iran
reenter the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action before it receives economic
relief, he will probably soon start green-lighting billions of dollars in
assistance and lifting sanctions. Tehran will undoubtedly remain in violation
of the atomic accord and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which
Iran is a signatory. Biden will do so for the same reason that Barack Obama
repeatedly gave ground in negotiations with the Islamic Republic: fear of
risking war or publicly conceding a nuke to the clerical regime. Iran’s supreme
leader, Ali Khamenei, who has an autarkist streak and despises the United
States, has been ratcheting up the pressure.
Tehran has increased the quantity and quality of its enriched uranium and started to construct and deploy advanced centrifuges faster than what the JCPOA allowed. The clerical regime is also preventing the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency from accessing Iran’s nuclear facilities, which is in violation of the NPT. And for the fourth time under the Biden administration, an Iran-guided Shiite militia has rocketed an American base in Iraq. The president responded to one of the attacks with a limited strike in Syria.
Khamenei has been
point-blank — more so than he often is when he wants to give himself wiggle
room: “We have no sense of urgency, we are in no rush to see the United States
return to the JCPOA; this has never been a concern for us. . . . What
is our entirely reasonable demand is the lifting of sanctions; this is the
usurped right of the Iranian nation.”
Although senior
officials in the administration are loath to say this publicly, they need the
credible threat of U.S. military power and the pain of sanctions to drive the
supreme leader back into negotiations. As punishing as sanctions had been for
two and a half years under Donald Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign, they did
not crack the fortitude and faith of Iran’s ruling elite.
For Khamenei and his
security forces, the decisive moment came in the winter of 2019 when they
crushed nationwide, anti-regime protests, initially provoked by a rapid
increase in fuel prices. By 2020, after using machine-gun fire against the
poor, the supreme leader had overcome three years of increasingly severe
demonstrations. In his mind, he’d overcome American provocations.
Addicted to arms
control, with a uranium clock ticking, dreading the thought of another conflict
or Iranian-orchestrated violence against U.S. forces, President Biden is
probably meditating most on this: How can his administration choreograph
nuclear extortion as a mutual de-escalation that makes it seem Tehran has given
something substantial for the billions of dollars that the White House will
release? The Europeans, especially the French, have been similarly focused,
serving as a middleman in an effort to resuscitate what they regard as a
diplomatic triumph.
Philosophically, the
president is in a worse position than his former boss. President Obama was
averse to the use of military and economic coercion, seeing “engagement,”
especially Western commerce, as a catalyst for the clerical regime’s
moderation. He certainly appeared to believe that if Washington were nicer,
Tehran would reciprocate. The United States could make concession after
concession in negotiations — about sunset clauses, the destruction of existing
centrifuges, the development of more-powerful and easier-to-hide centrifuges,
intrusive inspections, undisclosed nuclear activities, ballistic missiles, and
regional aggression — and evolution could well prevent the worst-case
scenarios, which Obama probably wasn’t in any case prepared to stop militarily.
President Biden doesn’t appear that naïve.
Since Obama’s nuclear
outreach to Khamenei in 2012, we have seen the Islamic Republic’s official
emissaries take the lead in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Sunni
Syrians; undertake an assassination campaign against expatriate dissidents and
try to bomb an opposition conference outside Paris, which many Americans
attended; and savagely crush ordinary Iranians protesting. Some of Obama’s
people who are now Biden’s people could wince when Iran’s depredations in Syria
were paired with sanctions relief for the theocracy. Liberal internationalists,
and the Biden administration may be the last gasp of this species, have a
conscience. They are not blind to the problematic nature of the theory that the
Islamic Republic would be on the cusp of Thermidor if it were not for
“hardliners” in the United States.
Secretary of State
Antony Blinken has conceded that the JCPOA was far from what former secretary
of state John Kerry maintained it was, an agreement that forever shut down all
pathways to a bomb. If a follow-on agreement needs to be “longer, stronger, and
broader,” then the JCPOA was, at best, a stepping-stone. If the administration
is successful in selling a JCPOA 2.0 in Washington, the president will gain the
support of congressional Democrats who opposed the deal in 2015, and he might
even crack the Republican consensus, which, so far, has remained solidly
against any U.S. return to the nuclear accord. Some Republicans, as in 2015,
may want to find a diplomatic way to escape the American–Iranian confrontation,
to see hope on the desert horizon even if it’s a mirage.
But how President Biden
takes another step with Tehran isn’t clear — unless the administration just
intends to give way to Iranian demands, including lifting sanctions linked to
terrorism, missile proliferation, and the depredations of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards, while using tough rhetoric to camouflage its retreat. To
wit: Obama’s policy with a Senator Tom Cotton voiceover.
Iran’s supreme leader
certainly isn’t going to accept more restrictions on his industrial-size atomic
aspirations after the
United States lifts sanctions. Iranian Shiite imperialism and the
nuclear-weapons program aren’t exercises that financially have made any sense;
they do give satisfaction and security to religious revolutionaries who still
have a cause. Blinken, who doesn’t have the kumbaya instincts and hubris of
Kerry, may know this.
President Trump never
really tried to effect a containment policy against the Islamic Republic, where
Washington doggedly tries to roll back the clerical regime’s influence
throughout the Middle East, patiently aggravating the theocracy’s internal
weaknesses. And he unwisely premised his sanctions regime on obtaining a new,
more comprehensive, A-bomb-foreclosing agreement — a fantasy while Iran remains
the Islamic Republic. But containment would draw redlines. Billions of dollars
wouldn’t be transferred for a short, weak, and narrow nuclear deal. Mass
slaughter and terrorism wouldn’t be rewarded.
And the president of the
United States could reply to the supreme leader: “I don’t need to return to the
JCPOA, either.” In the Middle East’s endless hard-power contests, that would be
a momentous next step.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the
Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense
of Democracies, where Mark Dubowitz, sanctioned by Iran in 2019, is the CEO.
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Union pensions are being bailed out under the guise it relates to Covid 19:
And:
When HR 1passes the Senate, Pelosi will have accomplished her biggest goal - stabbing, in the back, those do not vote for Democrats and, in doing so, you can kiss America goodbye because, what little faith remains in the sanctity of honest elections will have been shredded.:
.Democrat Bill H.R. 1 Would Let People Vote Up To Two Weeks After Election Day
The Democratic Party is attempting to make Election Day into
“election season” with the radical “For The People Act of 2021” sponsored by Rep.
John P. Sarbanes, D-Md. The bill passed in the House on March 3 at a vote of
220 to 210.
As noted by Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann, the
Democratic-sponsored elections bill H.R. 1 would “require states to wait ten days after election day” to accept ballots.
Page 199 of the legislation states:
Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to prohibit a State
from having a law that allows for counting of ballots in an election for
Federal office that are received through the mail after the date that is 10
days after the date of the election.
As long as ballots are postmarked by Election Day, H.R. 1 would
effectively mandate that all states accept absentee ballots within that 10-day
window. But the bill takes it a step further, noting that election officials
would be restricted from verifying voter identification and eligibility. H.R. 1
would ban all state voter ID laws and has an ambiguous provision criminalizing
an individual from “hindering, interfering, or preventing” an individual from
voting or registering.
“H.R. 1 would federalize and micromanage the election process
administered by the states, imposing unnecessary, unwise, and unconstitutional
mandates on the states and reversing the decentralization of the American
election process—which is essential to the protection of our liberty and freedom,” The Heritage Foundation found.
It would (among other things) implement nationwide the worst
changes in election rules that occurred during the 2020 election; go even
further in eroding and eliminating basic security protocols that states have in
place; and interfere with the ability of states and their citizens to determine
the qualifications and eligibility of voters, ensure the accuracy of voter
registration rolls, secure the fairness and integrity of elections, and
participate and speak freely in the political process.
Prior to the 2020 presidential election, which did in fact turn
into an election season, several states extended the window for the acceptance
of mail-in ballots. Washington, California, Illinois, Utah, Alaska, District of
Columbia, Mayland, Ohio, and North Carolina all extended the period of
two-weeks or longer. Several states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania
accepted ballots about a week after Election Day.
Aside from the fact that it is odd the Democrats are trying to
make Election Day last as long as possible, H.R. 1 prohibits witness
notarization or signatures requirements for all absentee ballots. So, not only
will ballots be allowed to keep flowing like water weeks after Americans headed
to the polls, but the actual documents will need not be verified.
“We need commonsense election reform that reaffirms the authority
of states to create and administer their own election laws, not blatant federal
overreach,” Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, said in The Daily Signal last week. “We need rules that
ensure all eligible voters can vote and certainty that those votes will be
counted, not a road that leads to election fraud for the benefit of one
political party.”
The left, as well as some flaky Republicans, continue to brand
H.R. 1 as a plan “to strengthen voting rights across this country,” as
described by former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in Newsweek.
In actuality, the bill would do rather the opposite; it would
lessen the voting rights of law-abiding Americans who do not have to think
twice about providing something as straightforward as identification. It is a
low-bar requirement for a voter to have to head to the polls on Election Day,
or at least send in their absentee-ballot timely so Americans do not have to be
in a suspended and unhealthy state of having to wait to learn who their
president will be for weeks, if not months.
H.R. 1 will head to the Senate for consideration in the weeks
ahead.
Gabe Kaminsky is an intern at The Federalist and
a student at the University of Pittsburgh. His work has appeared in The Daily
Wire, Townhall.com, Fox News, The Washington Times, The American Conservative,
RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and other outlets. He is a
participant in the Academy program at The Heritage Foundation. Follow him on
Twitter @Gabe__Kaminsky
And:
Always after the fact:
MI Court: Michigan Secretary of State’s Absentee Ballot Order Broke Law, Vindicating Trump Claim
A Michigan judge ruled last week Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) broke state law when she unilaterally issued rules related to absentee balloting, legitimizing a key claim made by the Trump campaign in its legal challenges to the 2020 election.
Benson issued several unilateral orders during the 2020 election including sending absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. She also issued “guidance” on how to evaluate absentee ballots, a move Michigan Court of Claims Chief Judge Christopher Murray held violated the state’s Administrative Procedures Act.
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