Second, this is a final notice regarding my final notice to all those who would like to join me and others for a visit to The Savannah Classical Academy on Friday, April 17, at 11 AM and stay for lunch at the school, so please let me know. So far we have about 20 who have said they want to go. Details of where to meet etc. will follow.
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A response to my mia culpa from a friend and fellow memo reader who apparently does not care for Hillary either and turned her Ben Ghazi phrase back on her: "What the hell difference does it make.....he claims that, had he had the authority, he would indeed have canned her ass."
My response was: "Touche on her touchas!"
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Elections in Israel begin shortly. (See 1 below.)
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Hillary and Iran have something in common. They refuse to answer sensitive questions. Wonder why? (See 2 below.)
and
Are those 47 Senators traitors? You decide! (See 2a below.)
Obama wants a deal with Iran and though there are roadblocks I predict he will succumb . The consequence is a vast improvement in Iran's ability to control The Middle East, commensurate with a recognition that the U.N. trumps our Congress and Constitution.
Will Obama be allowed to accomplish his ultimate goal - the selling out of American foreign policy? (See 2b, 2c, 2d and 2e below.)
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March 2015 may prove a defining month in American history as Obama moves to accomplish his four remaining goals. It could mark 1-the end of American power in The Middle East,2- the beginning of the end for Israel in terms of its ability to defend itself against Iran which , most likely,3- will defeat our Congress and impose on America a deal Obama wanted bad enough to disregard the Constitutional powers of Congress in regard to treaty making by substituting the U.N.
Irrational and hysterical comments. Perhaps. The next few weeks will tell.
Meanwhile I still believe Netanyahu can craft together a government but it will be decidedly weaker and more fractured so Obama will have accomplished goal 4-l as well.
The next move on Obama's part will be to de-nuclear our own nation by decreasing the power of our nuclear triad.
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Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) WEEKLY COMMENTARY: FIVE QUICK PRE-ELECTION OBSERVATIOn
Author: Dr. Aaron Lerner
Source: Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA).
#1. It is an incredible privilege to be able to participate in the elections of the State of Israel. It is nothing less than being part of what is no less than a new “Tanach” (bible) period.
#2. The absolute wrong thing to do at this stage is engage in what amounts to post elections analysis before the polls have even closed.
The question today isn’t how the campaigns could have been run differently but instead what can still be done.
#3. There is one clear message for those who want Binyamin Netanyahu to continue serving as prime minister:
A vote for Lapid’s party is a vote for Herzog – not Netanyahu.
A vote for Kachlon’s party is a vote for Herzog – not Netanyahu.
And a vote for Deeri’s Shas party is a vote for Herzog – not Netanyahu.
#4. It does matter who is prime minister. Some are claiming that the Palestinian issue isn’t relevant for these elections because even a left wing government couldn’t reach a final agreement with the Palestinians.
But that’s not the point.
The narrative of the left is that the retreat from Gaza failed because it was unilateral.
If there had been a photo op ceremony handing over control Gaza would have been Paradise.
Right.
But that’s what they think.
So if Mahmoud Abbas would be willing to have some Palestinians in uniform graciously participate in a hand over ceremony broadcast live on TV, a left wing government would jump at the opportunity to start transferring control of territory to the Palestinians.
And keep in mind: the Knesset doesn’t have to approve such withdrawals. A Government decision is all that’s required to start pulling Jews out of their homes in Judea and Samaria.
#5. When leftist politicians talk about “settlement blocs” there’s no telling what they really mean. The only “bloc” is the “Etzion Bloc”.
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2) ANALYSIS: TWELVE QUESTIONS IRAN REFUSES TO ANSWER ABOUT ITS NUCLEAR WEAPONS RESEARCH
Author: TheTower.org Staff
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has questions about twelve aspects of Iran’s past nuclear weapons research that the Islamic Republic has failed to satisfactorily answer, according to an analysis that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday.
These twelve areas of past Iranian research include computer simulations, detonation experiments, and delivery systems for nuclear warheads. While the analysis lists one of the areas of questions as having been discussed and two as “being on the table,” the other nine have not been discussed at all.
The one listed as having been discussed was research into electrically-fired detonators, which Iran explained as having applications for peaceful mining purposes. But experiments involving such detonators are believed to have taken place in the military base at Parchin, and Iran has not allowed a thorough investigation of the site. It has also paved over areas where the experiments are believed to have taken place.
According to the analysis, there is an ongoing debate among Western negotiators over how much weight to give to Iran’s failure to abide by past agreements (including the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action ) and come clean about its illicit military nuclear program.
That inner debate, as one European official in the midst of the negotiations put it, turns on “whether to force Iran to explain its past” — especially before 2003, when American intelligence officials believe Iran operated a full-scale equivalent of the Manhattan Project — “or whether to focus on the future.”
American officials are vague when pressed on how fully Iran will have to answer questions it has avoided for years from United Nations inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna. To date, Iran has dodged all but one of the agency’s dozen sharp questions on bomb design.
“Iran’s most serious verification shortcoming,” Olli Heinonen, the former chief inspector, now at Harvard, said recently, “remains its unwillingness to address concerns about the past and possibly ongoing military dimensions of its nuclear program.”
The questions cited by the analysis were prompted by documentation accumulated by the IAEA raising questions about the nature of Iran’s nuclear research. Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, dismissed Iranian charges that the incriminating documents were forged, “saying the inspectors had confirmed the documents by consulting other sources.”
The analysis zeroes in on the fundamental question raised by the incriminating documents:
The problem is that the documents, if real, would undercut Iran’s argument that its nuclear ambitions are entirely peaceful, centering on the production of radioisotopes for medicine and electrical power for economic growth.
Expertise in warhead design, as opposed to atomic fuel production, is far more ephemeral and hard to track. It can also be less ambiguous. Some nuclear parts have application only to making weapons, such as neutron spark plugs at the core of some atom bombs. In contrast, uranium can fuel both nuclear arms and reactors that make electricity — it can light cities or annihilate them.
Without full knowledge of Iran’s past nuclear research—some of which could be ongoing secretly—there is no way to verify that Iran’s nuclear program is only for civilian purposes. As Omri Ceren, The Israel Project’s managing director for press and strategy, explained for The Tower last October, establishing the full extent of Iran’s past nuclear research is essential to establishing a baseline for effective verification that Iran has no military nuclear program. The Israel Project publishes The Tower.
At stake are international concerns over the so-called possible military dimensions (PMDs) of the Iranian nuclear program, the central significance of which has sometimes been underplayed by voices within the foreign policy community. While the P5+1 is charged with negotiating over Iran’s uranium work, its plutonium work, and its ballistic missile work – all of which the Iranians are obligated by half a dozen United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions to roll back – the IAEA seeks to establish the scope of Iran’s overall atomic program, including in those three more specific areas.
The mandate stretches beyond full-blown weaponization work, and into military involvement in uranium mining, centrifuge construction, and so on. Full Iranian disclosure is considered a minimum to establishing a robust verification regime: The IAEA can’t verify that Iran has met its obligations to limit uranium work, for instance, unless it knows the full scope of the uranium work that’s being done. PMD-related transparency is seen as not just another issue – say, one that Iran could refuse to trade away by making concessions in other areas – but as a prerequisite to verifying Iranian compliance across all issues.
Acknowledging the full extent of its past nuclear research and current secret research is essential for Iran to show that it has no hidden military nuclear program. But as a former administration official told The New York Times at the time the Joint Plan of Action was signed:
There is no evidence of those facilities now, but, as a former senior Obama administration official said recently, speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence, “there has never been a time in the past 15 years or so when Iran didn’t have a hidden facility in construction.”
Additionally, the The New York Times reported last November:
The American officials are highly attuned to the findings of a once-classified 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iran ended its headlong race for a bomb in late 2003. But it also concluded that smaller-scale activity continued, and warned that “Iran probably would use covert facilities — rather than its declared nuclear sites — for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon.”
This underscores the significance of Amano’s declaration in late January (and repeated last week by the IAEA):
As far as Iran is concerned, the Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material declared to us by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement.
But we are not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.
2a)
ABOUT THOSE ‘TRAITOROUS’ 47 SENATORS
On April 14, 2004, approximately one year before the Gaza withdrawal, a letter was sent to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by then-President George W. Bush, which stated:
“As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”
The reason why I bring this up now is not because there are any new land withdrawals around major existing Israeli population centers being currently contemplated. The reason that I am bringing this up is that this “iron clad assurance” was quickly forgotten as soon as Bush closed the White House door, even before President Barack Obama had a chance to measure the windows for drapes.
In the beginning of Obama’s first administration, I was present at a Washington forum where I asked Dennis Ross, then part of the Obama administration, about this understanding. He responded, “That agreement no longer holds. It sunsetted when Bush left office.” Period. End of story.
As soon as Obama assumed office, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began describing the settlements as “illegitimate,” saying “I think it is absolutely clear to say, number one, that it’s been American policy for many years that settlements were illegitimate.”
This fact was strongly refuted in a June 26, 2009 Wall Street Journal article by Elliott Abrams, who served in President George W. Bush’s National Security Council. He wrote, “On settlements, we also agreed on principles that would permit some continuing growth.”
It should also be noted that this agreement was ratified by both the House and the Senate, in its passage of House Congressional Resolution 460, which was passed concurrently in the Senate by an overwhelming majority of members of both chambers.
This is particularly relevant now, because last week Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), along with 46 of his Republican colleagues, sent a letter to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran explaining how our constitution works. To be binding, an international treaty requires ratification of two-thirds of the Senate. A congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in the House and either a majority vote or a three-fifths majority vote in the Senate (depending on Senate rules). An agreement with no Congressional majority support is merely an executive agreement.
Unfortunately, this letter, which stated the laws of our constitution, was met with nothing short of apoplexy by members of the Obama administration and their cheerleaders in the Democratic Party.
Vice President Joe Biden issued a formal statement of outrage, saying: “I served in the United States Senate for 36 years. I deeply believe in its traditions, in its value as an institution, and in its indispensable constitutional role in the conduct of our foreign policy. The letter sent on March 9 by 47 Republican Senators to the Islamic Republic of Iran, expressly designed to undercut a sitting president in the midst of sensitive international negotiations, is beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.”
Secretary of State John Kerry, when testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Islamic State group on Wednesday, engaged in a heated exchange with Senate committee members, saying his reaction to the letter was “utter disbelief” and calling it a breach of “more than two centuries of precedent.”
Kerry seems to have conveniently forgotten a few small details, however.
When Obama was a senator in 2008, he sent a personal representative, Ambassador William G. Miller, to Tehran to encourage the Islamic republic not to enter into any agreement with the outgoing Bush administration. Why? Because negotiations with the Obama administration would be much more amicable.
Another small detail that seems to have evaded Kerry’s memory is that in 1985, when he was a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Kerry travelled together with Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, also a Democrat, to meet with Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. They openly sought to work with the communist Sandinistas, which was in direct opposition to the policies of then-President Ronald Reagan.
In fact, there are numerous other examples of instances where congressmen — of both political parties — have acted in a way similar to Senator Cotton and his 46 colleagues.
Perhaps the most disgraceful example is documented by Hassan Dai, a human rights activist and Iranian dissident. Dai has courageously exposed the National Iranian American Council as being a pro-Iranian regime lobby. He hasdocumented the many times that then-Iranian U.N. Ambassador and current Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, together with NIAC head Trita Parsi, met with members of Congress to exploit their foreign policy differences with then-President George W. Bush.
Parsi tried to deny the truth of these allegations. He tried, unsuccessfully, to sue Hassan Dai for defamation, but the suit was dropped and NIAC had to pay damages to Mr. Dai. During the lawsuit, however, a series of very revealing emails from NIAC were released that explained the extent of the collaboration with the Iranian regime. One email exchange, for example, shows how in 2006, Zarif gave a copy of a white paper outlining the Iranian American offer for a “grand bargain” to Parsi. That paper was subsequently released to the press and used to argue that Iran was ready for diplomacy. Just a few weeks later, Parsi launched something which he titled the “Iran Negotiation Project.” This was when he started to arrange for meetings between himself, members of Congress who opposed Bush’s policy on Iran, and Zarif.
Although the New York Daily News has recklessly used the word “traitors” to characterize the 47 senators who simply wrote the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran to inform them about how our constitution is set up, it would have been a great deal more judicious to have reserved this word for the Zarif-Parsi meetings with members of Congress. Let us not forget that these members of Congress were meeting with Parsi and Zarif at exactly the same time in history when our U.S servicemen were being killed and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan by IEDs made in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and while Iran was being classified by the State Department as the world’s number one supporter and funder of global terrorism.
Actually, the 47 senators are great patriots who have a keen understanding of the U.S. Constitution. They understand that there are supposed to be three equal branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial. They also understand that Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says that all binding treaties require a relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch that includes Senate “advice and consent.” Finally, they firmly understand that they have been sidelined out of the Iran negotiations, and that the United States, under Obama, might well be entering into a very perilous agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will give the Iranians license from the international community to enter into the circle of nations possessing nuclear weapons. And these senators know that if the Obama administration has its way, they will not be informed of the details of the agreement until it is a fait accompli.
And that would be disastrous for the region and for all freedom-loving citizens of the world.
Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of the endowment for middle east truth, a pro-Israel and pro-American think tank and policy shop in Washington.
2b) IRAN NEGOTIATORS FACE LATE OBSTACLES TO A DEAL
Author(s): David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon
WASHINGTON — The United States and Iran are closing in on a historic agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, but are confronting serious last-minute obstacles, including when United Nations sanctions would be lifted and how inspections would be conducted, American and European officials said.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who heads to Lausanne, Switzerland, on Sunday night for a critical round of talks, is still clashing with his Iranian counterpart over Tehran’s demand that all United Nations sanctions be suspended as soon as there is a deal, as well as Washington’s insistence that international inspectors be able to promptly visit any nuclear site, even those on Iranian military bases.
There are also disagreements over Iran’s research and development of advanced centrifuges, which would allow Iran to produce nuclear fuel far more quickly, as well as over how many years an agreement would last.
The White House hopes that an accord might eventually open a new chapter in a relationship that has been marked largely by decades of mutual suspicion, Iranian-sponsored terrorism, American cyberattacks and Iranian retaliation. But even the prospect of the deal has set off a furious political confrontation between the White House and Republicans who say an accord will fail to end Iran’s bomb program and even encourage Arab nations to mount their own nuclear efforts. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Congress recently that the effect of the emerging deal with Iran would be “to move from preventing proliferation to managing it.”
Mr. Kerry at a January meeting with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is seeking an end to sanctions.
(Credit: photo by Rick Wilking)
Mr. Kerry at a January meeting with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is seeking an end to sanctions.
(Credit: photo by Rick Wilking)
The areas of convergence in the deal circulating in Washington and European capitals include a complex arrangement in which Iran would ship large portions of its stockpiles of uranium out of the country, almost certainly to Russia. In return, the United States and its negotiating partners could allow Iran to keep roughly 6,500 of its centrifuges spinning, rather than the few hundred that were under discussion a year ago.
The number of centrifuges, which may be altered in the final stages of talks, will take on outsize proportions in the public debate here. Opponents of the deal argue that it will leave the Iranians with a latent production capacity, even though the country would have limited amounts of uranium to work with. American officials insist that for at least the first 10 years of a final accord, the mix of fuel and enrichment capacity will leave the United States, Israel and others with at least a year’s worth of warning time if Iran raced to make a bomb’s worth of material — compared to just a few months of warning time today.
But inside the negotiating rooms, there are still major debates about how to phase in the lifting of United Nations, American and European sanctions as Iran complies with the terms. The sanctions standoff underscores a little-discussed but politically volatile issue for the Obama administration: how quickly Iran would see economic and technological benefits from any accord.
A suspension, and ultimate elimination, of the sanctions on oil exports and financial transactions is the key issue for President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and his lead negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, if they hope to sell a 10-year or longer limitation on their nuclear activity to Iranian mullahs and military leaders who have opposed the negotiations. As details of the talks leak, they are being used by opponents in Tehran, especially the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees the military side of the nuclear program. They argue that by limiting Iran’s capabilities for so many years, the United States would use an accord to thwart Iran’s emergence as the major power in the Middle East.
But any rapid lifting of sanctions — by vote of the Security Council and by President Obama’s decisions to gradually waive imposition of American- imposed economic penalties — could intensify the already fierce congressional debate. Congress would ultimately need to vote to remove American sanctions, though it might not be asked to do so until Mr. Obama is out of office. And some Republicans may balk at doing that and instead try to toughen the terms, perhaps to the point that Iran might no longer accept them.
An adviser to Mr. Kerry said the secretary recently expressed concern that even if he wins his last negotiating points with Iran, any accord “is going to be a heavy lift” in Congress.
“He’s rightly worried,” said the adviser, who would not be named because he was discussing sensitive diplomatic talks. “The chances of reaching an agreement are now higher than ever, and the chances it will collapse politically here are higher, too.”
Mr. Kerry is calling in reinforcements to bolster the argument that an accord would guarantee that, for a decade or more, that the United States and its allies have at least a year’s warning before Iran could manufacture a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear scientist who has negotiated with his Iranian counterpart during the last two rounds of talks, is part of the American team at the coming negotiations as well. Mr. Moniz is there to negotiate details that once seemed as if they were the eye-glazing stuff of diplomacy — how to modify arrays of centrifuges so they cannot easily make weapons fuel, for example — which is suddenly becoming crucial to the political debate.
2c) AN END TO IRAN'S CONTAINMENT?
Author: Washington Post Editorial Board
THE OBAMA administration is seeking to assure U.S. allies and congressional skeptics that the nuclear accord it is contemplating with Iran will not lead to a broader detente with the Islamic republic. “We are not seeking a grand bargain,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry declared last week during a visit to Riyadh he made with the explicit purpose of countering Saudi Arabian suspicions to the contrary. “We will not take our eye off of Iran’s other destabilizing actions in places like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.”
The political imperative behind this clarification is easily understood. In recent months, the notion that President Obama is prepared to scrap the 35-year-old U.S. policy of seeking to contain Iranian influence in the Middle East has been widely accepted by Arab and Israeli officials and U.S. commentators; opposition to such a reversal is one reason the prospective nuclear deal is generating bipartisan unease in Congress.
The president himself has provided much of the fuel for the speculation. According to news accounts, Mr. Obama has dispatched four private letters to the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The most recent one, in October, assured the ayatollah that the United States would not attack Iranian forces or those of its Syrian ally in operations against the Islamic State, according to the Wall Street Journal. Publicly, Mr. Obama said in an interview in December that he hoped a nuclear deal “would serve as the basis for us trying to improve relations over time”; if Iran agreed to the accord, he added, it could become “a very successful regional power.”
Such statements have understandably alarmed Mideast leaders at a time when Tehran is engaged in what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “march of conquest, subjugation and terror.” A relaxation of U.S. efforts to resist this bid for regional hegemony would be a strategic calamity for Israel and the Persian Gulf states. Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said after speaking to Mr. Kerry that it was “really the main concern of the Gulf Cooperation Council.”
Unfortunately, the administration’s assurances are at odds with its actions. While the nuclear negotiations have continued, Mr. Obama has refused to support military action against the Assad regime in Syria, in accord with his letter’s reported promise, and his administration has tacitly blessed an ongoing, Iranian-led offensive in Iraq’s Sunni heartland. It took no action to stop the ouster by an Iranian-backed militia of a pro-U.S. Yemeni regime. Nor has it reacted to Iran’s deployment of thousands of Shiite fighters to southern Syria, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
That record raises the question of what the administration’s response will be to further Iranian adventurism following a nuclear deal. Will it help its allies fight back, or will it restrain itself in the interest of preventing a rupture of the nuclear accord and in order to “improve relations over time”? Mr. Obama argued last week that if Iran obtained nuclear weapons it “would make it far more dangerous and would give it scope for even greater action in the region.” That’s clearly true; the worry is that his current policies, combined with the lifting of sanctions, could have the same result.
2c) Democrats Prepared to Turn Against Iran Deal
Despite the backlash against the open letter sent last week by Republicans to Iran's leaders, Democrats say they are still prepared to support legislation that could impose new sanctions on Iran or give Congress review power over the deal, Politico reported.
"The letter's incredibly unfortunate and inappropriate," North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who voted for the sanctions bill in committee and is a sponsor of the congressional approval legislation, told Politico. "That doesn't diminish my support for the legislation that we introduced."
The White House has been lobbying Congress to stay out of its negotiations. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker to hold off on a vote on his bill that would give Congress 60 days to reject or approve any deal until after the administration finished its negotiations.
The bill has nearly a dozen Democratic supporters but McDonough argues that the measure "goes well beyond ensuring that Congress has a role to play in any deal with Iran."
Corker has said that he has not seen any Democrats back away from their support of his measure.
"Nobody's dropping out. We've had reaffirmed commitment," from Democrats, he told Politico.
"Nobody's dropping out. We've had reaffirmed commitment," from Democrats, he told Politico.
As it stands, nearly all of the 54 Republicans and more than a dozen Democrats in the Senate are on board.
"The letter was simply unacceptable, and it brought hyperpartisanship to an issue that we need to maintain our bipartisanship in," Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, a supporter of sanctions that would not take effect unless talks fall apart or Iran backs away from the terms of any deal, told Politico.
"That doesn't change my support for that bill. … I stay firm."
A group of 10 Democrats has insisted it would not support a bill that would allow Congress to reject a deal before the March 24 negotiations deadline.
Meanwhile, the House intends to hold hearings this week to question administration officials on Iran, a signal which may indicate an intention to pass a sanctions bill as the House did in 2013.
The White House is focused on achieving the deal regardless of moves on Capitol Hill.
"The administration is focused on achieving a deal that prevents Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon," a senior administration official told Politico.
"The letter was simply unacceptable, and it brought hyperpartisanship to an issue that we need to maintain our bipartisanship in," Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, a supporter of sanctions that would not take effect unless talks fall apart or Iran backs away from the terms of any deal, told Politico.
"That doesn't change my support for that bill. … I stay firm."
A group of 10 Democrats has insisted it would not support a bill that would allow Congress to reject a deal before the March 24 negotiations deadline.
Meanwhile, the House intends to hold hearings this week to question administration officials on Iran, a signal which may indicate an intention to pass a sanctions bill as the House did in 2013.
The White House is focused on achieving the deal regardless of moves on Capitol Hill.
"The administration is focused on achieving a deal that prevents Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon," a senior administration official told Politico.
2e)
Obama’s Iran Jam
The White House wants the U.N. to vote but not the U.S. Congress.
Senator Bob Corker PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS
One unfortunate side effect of last week’s letter from 47 GOP Senators to Iran is that it has helped the White House and its media friends obscure the far more important story—the degree to which President Obama is trying to prevent Congress from playing any meaningful role in assessing his one-man Iran deal.
Administration officials are huffing about Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s “unconstitutional” letter, but it’s only a letter and Congress has the right to free speech. If a mere letter from a minority of the Senate has the power to scuttle a deal with Iran, as Mr. Obama suggests it might, then maybe the deal is too fragile to be worth doing.
The real constitutional outlier here is Mr. Obama’s attempt to jam Congress so it’s irrelevant. That’s clear from a remarkable exchange of letters between Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough.
Mr. Corker wrote March 12 asking the President to clarify comments by Vice PresidentJoe Biden and others that an Iran deal could “take effect without congressional approval.” He also asked about media reports that “your administration is contemplating taking an agreement, or aspects of it, to the United Nations Security Council for a vote,” while threatening to veto legislation that would require Congress to vote.
Mr. McDonough replied for the President on the weekend in a letter that can only be described as an affront to Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. The chief of staff asked Mr. Corker to further delay his bipartisan legislation that would require a Senate vote within 60 days on any Iran deal. “The legislation would potentially prevent any deal from succeeding by suggesting that Congress must vote to ‘approve’ any deal, and by removing existing sanctions waiver authorities that have already been granted to the President,” he wrote.
So Mr. McDonough says Congress has “a role to play,” whatever that is, as long as it doesn’t interfere with what Mr. Obama wants. And once Congress grants Mr. Obama a waiver, it can never take that away even if Congress concludes that the President is misusing it.
The larger context here is that Mr. Obama is trying to make his Iran deal a fait accomplibefore Congress has any say. His plan is to strike a deal and submit it to the U.N. Security Council for approval, hemming in Congress. He’ll then waive some Iran sanctions on his own, while arguing that anyone who opposes the deal wants war.
Mr. McDonough’s letter includes a long list of previous agreements that “do not require congressional approval.” But the examples he cites are either minor accords or have had substantial bipartisan support. There is no precedent in the nuclear era for a President negotiating such a major arms-control accord without Congressional assent.
Mr. Obama might have avoided this showdown with Congress if he hadn’t treated America’s elected representatives as little more than a public nuisance. His minions have disclosed more details of the Iran talks to the media than to Congress. It’s little wonder that few Members of either party trust his negotiating skill or security judgment.
Mr. Corker has 65 supporters for his legislation, and he has already delayed it through March 24 at the request of Democrats. If he delays it any more, he risks conceding Mr. Obama’s desire to make Congress the irrelevant equivalent of the Iranian parliament.
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