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Russia Takes Over Syria Base
CAIRO [MENL] -- Russia has taken over a major Syrian air force base.
Arab diplomatic sources said the Russian military has been allowed to
expand deployment in the Syrian air base at Latakia. They said the Russian
Air Force sent crews to upgrade the Syrian facility that would accommodate a
large number of aircraft.
"They are essentially modernizing the entire air base, particularly the
airport," a source said.
http://www.menewsline.com/article-1173,35240-Russia-Takes-Over-Syria-Base.aspx
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At best! You decide. (See 1 below.)
Spitting on the Constitution. (See 1a below.)
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I am not endorsing Jeb's tax plan but at least he is putting ideas before the voters whereas Trump is presently is engaged in bragging, bluster and uncouth statements. To be balanced, Trump says he will soon release his own tax overhaul plan . (See 2 below.)
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Confusion, weakness and timorous behaviour comes at a price and these are the ingredients that constitutes the Obama Doctrine! (See 3 and 3a below.)
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I have repeatedly written , in the final analysis and when the rubber hits the road, lower Federal Courts will become the best protector our Republic. I wish I could say the same about Robert's Supreme Court.
Now that the Republicans have been 'koshered' when it comes to having legal standing the next questions are a) will they take advantage of the club they have been given and b) will they do so in an effective and timely method? Stay tuned! (See 4 below.)
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Krauthammer looks at the mechanisms used by Obama to shove the Iran Deal down our throats and this includes Congress. He does so in a cold analytical basis and is going to be proven absolutely correct. (See 5 below.)
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Now for some humor. Sent to me by a long standing and dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 6 below.)
and
Bill tried to cheer up Hillary this morning.
He reminded her that Nelson Mandela wasn't elected president until after he had served 27 years in prison.
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Laundering Iran's Nukes
by A.J. Caschetta
Let's come clean. Let's finally recognize the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for what it is -- a laundering project designed to legitimize Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Like a money-laundering scheme by which illegally-earned or stolen money is cleansed or laundered through a legitimate business, Iran's illegal nuclear weapons program is being cleansed and validated before the world's eyes at the behest of the Obama administration.
The goals of the diplomatic process have changed tremendously from the beginning when President Obama regularly claimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon is "unacceptable" and that only his unique brand of personal diplomacy could prevent it.
At best, the JCPOA delays an Iranian nuclear weapon by 10 to 15 years.
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But now, even the most generous (or naive) reading of the deal acknowledges that, at best, it delays an Iranian nuclear weapon by 10 to 15 years, after which the Islamic Republic of Iran emerges with a full-blown legal nuclear weapons program. Rather than "prevent" or "block" Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, as the president and Secretary of State John Kerry falsely claim, the deal assures Iran of legally acquiring one. It is like telling a jewel thief caught red-handed that if he stops stealing jewels for 15 years, all charges against him will be dropped and he can keep his ill-gotten booty.
Although much of the public debate has centered on the details of the restrictions that will be dropped in 2030, many people believe that Iran will cheat on the deal. And since the ultimate arbiter of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA will be the United Nations, it is fair to assume that its record of failure will continue. This seems very probable, as it is Iran that will present much of the evidence to "prove" that it is in compliance.
Past IAEA monitoring of Iran's nuclear program was hamstrung by the unwillingness of then-director Mohamed ElBaradei (right) to confront the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left).
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Regrettably, since the beginning of the century, when Mohamed ElBaradei was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran has made significant advances in its covert, illicit nuclear program. As Iran played cat-and-mouse games with the inspections, ElBaradei studiously avoided confronting the regime and soft-pedaled its violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. For this work, ElBaradei was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
Some critics of the deal cite Ronald Reagan's advice to "trust but verify." However, the verification process involves a 24-day waiting period between requesting an inspection and gaining access to an Iranian nuclear site.
Some commentators are placated by the claims of Secretary of Energy and Obama diplomat Ernest Moniz that 24 days is insufficient to hide the kinds of work that Iran has agreed to halt. But after first learning that only IAEA inspectors will be allowed to inspect sites, it was revealed that none of them will be Americans, and we have now learned that only Iranian inspectors will be allowed at crucial military sites such as the Parchin complex. That looks like too much trust and too little verification.
The exact contents of the JCPOA remain a mystery even to U.S. officials.
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Another objection often cited is that no one, including John Kerry and Ernest Moniz, even knows what the JCPOA is. The exact contents of the JCPOA deal remains a mystery, much like the fictitious fatwa banning nuclear weapons that wasallegedly issued by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and is frequently cited by Obama -- yet has been seen by no one. Parts of the JCPOA are hidden, not only from the public, but even from American diplomats, as Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, admits. Ernest Moniz dismisses our willful ignorance of the JCPOA's terms as standard operating procedure, and John Kerry says we must respect the process that allows the IAEA and Iran to have secret side deals undisclosed to any of the P5+1 signatories. But these terms make the JCPOA deal unknowable. Signing it is not an act of diplomacy; it is surrender.
Iran acquired nuclear technology in 1957 through the U.S. Atoms for Peace program. Recipients of the Eisenhower Administration's nuclear largesse were required to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is regularly updated with various safeguards and protocols. By weaponizing its nuclear program, Iran has violated every agreement it has signed.
The JCPOA is rewarding these violations. It also signals to all countries, good and bad, that now is the time to break treaties with the U.S., when the likelihood of a serious response is low or absent altogether. Surely Iran's leaders have noticed the U.S. response to Russia's violations of the Budapest Memorandum, its invasion of Ukraine and the Crimea and its moves in the Arctic Circle. Surely, they have also noticed the U.S. response to China's construction of islands that are military bases throughout the South China Sea.
So while it is unlikely that Iran will suffer any consequences for cheating (assuming the U.S. even learns of any offenses), there is almost no reason to cheat. The terms of the JCPOA are so one-sided that soon Iran will emerge with all the nuclear weapons it wants, as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them to the "Great Satan". And then it will be too late.
It's hard not to conclude that the JCPOA was designed to ensure that Iran gets a legitimate nuclear weapons program.
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There is only one flaw in the JCPOA laundering scheme. In a true money-laundering scheme that involves an outlaw and a legitimate party, the money launderer receives a fee for the service provided; in this trade, the U.S. earns nothing from the JCPOA. The U.S. does not even get back one of the Americans held hostage by Iran. Iran will not admit to any culpability for murdering Americans around the globe, much less pay reparations for them.
There has not even been a perfunctory, empty promise to cease funding terrorist groups andthreatening genocide against Israel and America.
It is hard not to conclude that the JCPOA was designed from the beginning to ensure that Iran would get a legitimate nuclear weapons program, confirmed with the imprimatur of the United States and the United Nations. What remains unknown is why the president and most of his partywant a nuclear Iran.
A.J. Caschetta is a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum.
1a)
Spitting on the Constitution to pass the Iran deal
It’s rare for people to celebrate getting 41 percent of anything. If you score 41 percent on a test, you get an F. If you win 41 percent of the vote in a two-person race, you lose. If your tax rate is 41 percent, you’re likely to feel ripped off.
In the matter of his Iran deal, President Obama and his team have spent two months working relentlessly to secure 41 percent — and now they’re claiming an enormous victory even though by any other standards what they’ve achieved is nothing but a feat of unconstitutional trickery.
They worked throughout the summer to browbeat Senate Democrats so they could get 41 of them to say they would support the Iran nuclear deal. They’re up to 42 now — that’s a mere 42 percent of the Senate.
Why is the number 41 so magical? Why is a failure of this magnitude being greeted as a triumph?
Welcome to the Bizarro World that is Barack Obama’s Washington.
Under the Constitution, treaties require the support of two-thirds of the Senate. The deal with Iran is a treaty in every respect — a legally binding long-term agreement between sovereign powers, in which hundreds of billions of dollars will flow and billions of dollars in nuclear materiel will be destroyed.
Since this is a treaty and we have 100 senators, Obama should have been obliged to secure the backing of 67 senators, not 41.
But Obama knew he could never get his treaty through Congress. You see, the American people have given the Republican Party majorities in both the House and the Senate.
The very fact that the American people did so to put a brake on Obama’s outsized ambitions just wasn’t going to hold this guy back.
After first informing Congress that he would simply implement it — as an executive action rather than a treaty — without submitting the deal to a vote, Obama relented.
Kind of.
He and Congress agreed the deal would be subject to a vote — not of approval, like a treaty, but of disapproval. It would be treated like any piece of legislation. It would be voted on by the House and the Senate, and if they turned thumbs-down, he could then exercise his presidential veto.
The Constitution requires a second vote by the two Houses of Congress to overturn such a veto — and in that case, the vote has to be by two-thirds.
That’s why for months people have been saying the president has turned the Constitution on its head — because instead of 67 senators having to support the deal to make it legal, 67 senators have to disapprove of it to render it null and void.
But now comes that infamous 41 number. Why is this important? Because of a weird Senate procedure called “cloture,” the only way to get a vote on the floor of the Senate is for 60 senators to agree to allow it to happen. So if 41 disagree, the bill cannot be voted on.
With 42 senators saying they will support the deal, Obama may have the raw numbers to block even the first vote.
Thus, it may well be that for the first time in American history, a president will simply impose a treaty on the country without even the pretense of seeking and obtaining the advice and consent of the Congress.
And how? With 42 percent.
To call this a scandal doesn’t even begin to do justice to what it is. It really does suggest we are fast turning into a banana republic, whose leader feels free to spit on a Constitution whose central purpose is to restrain the ambitions of strongmen and their shameful toadies.
2) The Bush Growth Plan
Tax reform that would cut rates and unleash business investment.
Conventional politics says presidential candidates should keep their tax reform plans gauzy and nonspecific. So much for that. Jeb Bush on Wednesday rolled out a tax plan that is remarkably detailed, including the tax deductions he’d eliminate in return for cutting rates to spur faster economic growth.
The former Florida Governor has made reviving growth and raising wages his main policy goals, and the tax plan is his first down payment on getting there. These are the right goals given six years of tepid growth and median household income that is still lower than when the expansion began in 2009. Faster growth than 2% a year is crucial to solving every other problem—from drawing more Americans back into the workforce, to reducing poverty, to financing U.S. defenses against growing global threats.
Tax reform is essential to reviving growth, but the danger is that it can become a slogan that masks bad policy. Hillary Clinton’s reform idea is to raise taxes on capital investment, which would harm growth. Some GOP “reformacons” want to play on Democratic turf and redistribute income via tax credits, which does nothing for growth.
The point is that the reform details matter, and Mr. Bush’s proposal is a vast improvement on the current tax code that would give the economy a huge lift. His brain trust includes four economists— John Cogan, Martin Feldstein, Glenn Hubbard and Kevin Warsh—who have spent years thinking about taxes and have written often for these pages.
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The pro-growth news starts with a sharp reduction in marginal tax rates on individual and corporate income. Mr. Bush would take the top personal rate down to 28% from well above 40% now (including surcharges and phase-outs), while the top corporate rate would go to 20% from 35%. These are big cuts that would have a major impact on the incentive to work and invest.
Liberal economists argue that marginal rates don’t matter now that they are no longer above 50%. But the Reagan reform of 1986—which Mr. Bush cites as a precedent—cut the top rate to 28% from 50%. That reform helped to sustain the 1980s economic boom and set the stage for growth through the 1990s.
Mr. Bush’s corporate rate cut would move the U.S. from the developed world’s highest to below the median. He’d move to a territorial system that would let businesses pay taxes in the country where income is earned, and he would apply a one-time tax hit of 8.75% (payable over 10 years) on the $2.1 trillion in income that companies keep abroad to avoid the punishing U.S. rate.
The GOP candidate would also turbocharge capital spending by letting businesses deduct 100% of new investment immediately. This would eliminate complicated depreciation schedules that often distort investment choices. It also targets a major weak spot in this recovery, which is capital spending. All of this would increase the return on capital investment, which would flow to workers in higher wages.
The Bush economists argue conservatively that about 50% of the corporate tax burden hits workers, and they estimate that the Bush tax and regulatory reforms would lift average compensation by $2,750 a year by 2020 and $6,200 by 2025 (in 2015 dollars). This is how faster growth lifts everyone far more than does liberal or conservative income redistribution.
In return for this rate-cutting, Mr. Bush proposes to limit deductions and eliminate loopholes—including some political favorites. On the personal side, he’d kill the federal tax write-off for state and local taxes. This won’t go down well in liberal California or New York, but it means taxpayers in low-tax states would no longer have to subsidize profligate government. It would also give Mr. Bush a big bargaining chip with Congress if he becomes President.
Mr. Bush makes the mistake of preserving the charitable deduction, out of a belief that private charity reduces the need for government. But Americans are generous and don’t need a tax break to donate if tax rates are low enough. It also benefits the wealthy more than average taxpayers.
The better news is that Mr. Bush adopts Mr. Feldstein’s proposal to cap all other deductions combined at 2% of adjusted gross income. So taxpayers could still take the mortgage-interest and other deductions, but only up to the cap. Most taxpayers wouldn’t itemize under the Bush plan because he would also double the standard deduction, and the cap is progressive because it would squeeze taxpayers more as their income rises.
Mr. Bush’s most daring proposal is to kill the deduction for business interest expense. Economists have long believed that the U.S. tax code favors debt over equity, and Mr. Bush says he wants to level the playing field. This will upset businesses that run on leverage, but the tax code should be neutral toward business financing decisions. Deducting interest plus 100% expensing would also mean some businesses would have a negative tax rate.
Mr. Bush and his advisers acknowledge that all of this would raise less federal revenue than current law under conventional Washington scoring that assumes no increase in economic growth. But in the real world, unlike Washington, people and companies will respond to better incentives, the economy will grow faster, and over time government revenues will grow faster than without reform.
***
Mr. Bush also promises a regulatory reform proposal this year, and his advisers predict that his regulatory and tax reforms together would increase GDP by about 0.8% a year for a decade. We’d argue that’s conservative, and the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s is that 4% growth is possible.
Naturally, liberals will denounce the Bush plan as a tax cut for the rich, but with fewer deductions many affluent Americans will pay more. The two-term Governor also eliminates the lower tax rate for hedge-fund carried interest, not that the left will give him any credit for it.
The obvious retort is that six years of President Obama’s higher taxes and income redistribution have produced less growth and more inequality. The only way to raise American wages and lift the poor and middle class is with faster economic growth, which requires unleashing the pent-up productive capacity of American workers and business.
Mr. Bush will have to sell his plan in the crowded GOP field, but perhaps his policy seriousness will steer Republicans away from this summer’s sloganeering and toward a debate about what really would make America great again.
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3) The Rewards of the Obama Doctrine
Offering a helping hand to America’s enemies in Iran, Russia and Cuba will ruin lives and many more will die.
By GARRY KASPAROV
A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S. declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize an act not taken.
But what is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.
Looking at the wreckage of the Middle East, including the flourishing of Islamic State, it takes great imagination to see how things would be worse today if the U.S. had acted on Mr. Obama’s “red line” threat in 2013 and moved against Syria’s Bashar Assad after he defied the U.S. president and used chemical weapons.
Or farther east, one would need to have believed Moscow’s overheated nuclear threats to think that Ukraine would be worse off now if NATO had moved immediately to secure the Ukrainian border with Russia as soon asVladimir Putin invaded Crimea in 2014.
Over the past year, especially in the past few months, Mr. Obama’s belief that American force in the world should be constrained and reduced has reached its ultimate manifestation in U.S. relations with Iran, Russia and Cuba. Each of these American adversaries has been on the receiving end of the president’s helping hand: normalization with Cuba, releasing Iran from sanctions, treating the Putin Ukraine-invasion force as a partner for peace in the futile Minsk cease-fire agreements.
In exchange for giving up precisely nothing, these countries have been rewarded with the international legitimacy and domestic credibility dictatorships crave—along with more-concrete economic benefits.
When dealing with a regime that won’t negotiate in good faith, the best approach is to use a position of strength to pry concessions from the other side. But instead the White House keeps offering concessions—while helping its enemies off the mat. That such naïveté will result in positive behavior from the likes of Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin and the Castro brothers should be beyond even Mr. Obama’s belief in hope and change.
Dictatorships, especially the one-man variety like Russia’s, are unpredictable, but they do operate on logical underlying principles. They often come to power with popular support and a mandate to solve a crisis. Once a firm grip on power is achieved, the junta or supreme leader blames his predecessors for any problems, and he cracks down on rights. With democracy dead and civil society hunted to extinction, the only way left to make a legitimate claim on power is confrontation and conflict. Propaganda is ratcheted up against mythical fifth columnists and the usual scapegoats, like immigrants and minorities.
The next and usually final phase arrives when other tricks have become stale. Domestic enemies are never threatening enough—and eventually there is no one left to persecute, as in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin—so the dictator looks abroad, inevitably finding a “national interest” to defend across a convenient border.
This external-conflict phase is especially dangerous because there are very few examples of aggressor nations moving away from it peacefully. War and revolution are the more frequent ways it burns itself out. The Soviet Union altered its confrontational course after Stalin’s death, but it was a unique and gigantic superpower with enough resources for its leadership to believe that it could compete with the Free World instead of declaring war on it.
As it turned out, the Soviets were wrong, something that more-recent autocrats, including Mr. Putin, no doubt understand. They have watched and learned that their people will eventually begin to compare living standards and see the truth if left unmolested by war and strife. This window on the Free World is even larger in the Internet age, so the conflicts and propaganda have to be even more extreme.
Iran has been operating in the confrontational phase for years, with America and Israel as the main targets, in addition to Tehran’s regional Sunni rivals. Mr. Putin moved into confrontation mode with the invasion of Ukraine and he cannot afford to back down.
The dictatorship that Nicolás Maduro inherited from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela is approaching the final stage as well, as seen from the country’s recent launch of a border and immigrant conflict with Colombia. The emptier the shelves in Venezuelan supermarkets, the more threatening the Colombians must be made to seem. China has relied on tremendous growth to forestall internal unrest for human rights, but if its economy falters substantially, last week’s giant military parade in Beijing will be seen as prelude, not posturing. Taiwan, always in China’s sights, has good reason to be troubled by the West’s feeble responses in Syria and Ukraine.
Power abhors a vacuum, and as the U.S. retreats the space is being filled. After years of the White House leading from behind, Secretary of State John Kerry’s timid warning to the Kremlin this week to stay out of Syria will be as effective as Mr. Obama’s “red line.” Soon Iran—flush with billions of dollars liberated by the nuclear deal—will add even more heft to its support for Mr. Assad.
Dead refugee children are on the shores of Europe, bringing home the Syrian crisis that has been in full bloom for years. There could be no more tragic symbol that it is time to stop being paralyzed by the Obama-era mantra that things could be worse—and to start acting instead to make things better.
Mr. Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, is the author of “Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped,” out next month from PublicAffairs.
3a) Is Iran Another ObamaCare?
Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran could sink Democratic election campaigns—again.
It is eerie how much the politics of the Iran nuclear deal resemble the politics of ObamaCare. Many Democrats running for election in 2014 rode ObamaCare to defeat.Barack Obama’s latest “legacy,” the Iran nuclear deal, is resurrecting more Democratic electoral vulnerability. Some legacy.
On Tuesday, four Democratic senators—including incumbents Ron Wyden of Oregon and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut—nodded their assent to the nuclear deal, giving Mr. Obama the 42 votes needed to block a Senate vote on the deal and sparing the president what the Washington Post called “drama and embarrassment.”
The Iran deal is going to “pass”—if that’s the word for it—with less than 50 votes in the Senate. Welcome to the progressives’ Constitution.
Opinion Journal Video
Retired Air Force General Chuck Wald evaluates the Democratic candidate’s arguments in support of the nuclear pact. Photo credit: Getty Images.
It’s all redolent of ObamaCare’s 2010 passage—with no GOP votes—atop the Cornhusker Kickback for Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and the Louisiana Purchase for Sen. Mary Landrieu. This time, though, the White House got Democrats’ assent in return for little more than liberal belief in the potential goodness of all mankind.
But vaporizing the arcane tradition of simple Senate majorities may be the high point of the Iran deal for the Democrats.
The depth of opposition to the nuclear deal is startling, deeper than the disaffection with ObamaCare.
In a recent Quinnipiac poll the deal’s total level of support is 25%. That’s a very low number in the polling business. Opposition to the deal among independent voters is 59%, with 52% of women opposed.
Opinion Journal Video
Asked if the deal would make the world safer or less safe, 56% said less safe, and that includes 54% of women and 49% of college graduates. Its support is below 30% in every age category. A plurality of black voters say it makes the world less safe.
Will these numbers improve? The Pew Poll just out has support at 21%, a 12-point drop since July.
It’s a long way to November 2016. Maybe by then Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will lie down with the lamb and Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani will order his Middle Eastern storm troopers back to their barracks. Of course they won’t, and so congressional Democrats could pay a high political price for their de facto alliance with Iran.
In 2014’s midterm elections, fealty to Mr. Obama’s health-care law contributed a lot to ending the political careers of Senators Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Udall in Colorado and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Republican Joni Ernst picked up Iowa’s open Senate seat running hard against ObamaCare.
In 2016, Democrats are thought to be defending only two competitive seats—Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado and Harry Reid’s vacated Nevada seat. But the Iran deal’s nonsupport and high potential for risk could put into play retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s open Maryland seat or Washington state 24-year incumbent Sen. Patty Murray, who won in 2010 with 52.3%.
Conventional wisdom holds that at least six GOP seats are vulnerable: Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, Illinois’s Mark Kirk, Ohio’s Rob Portman, New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte and the Florida seat left open by Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential run.
But those calculations were made before the Iran nuclear deal started looking like the reincarnation of ObamaCare.
As with the health-care law, President Obama and this project’s edition of Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of State John Kerry, have both oversold the agreement’s upside and misrepresented the downside. Always on hand to force buy-in from her colleagues, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calls the deal a “diplomatic masterpiece.”
Connecticut’s Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, elected in 2010 with 55% of the vote, is a more suggestive straw in the wind. Describing his “support” for the Iran deal Tuesday, Sen. Blumenthal said, “This is not the agreement I would have accepted at the negotiating table.” More fantastic, Sen. Blumenthal said he and Maryland’s Sen. Ben Cardin will “begin the process of addressing (the deal’s) shortfalls, unwanted impacts and consequences.”
Sorry, senator. On the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, you’re in or you’re out. Unlike ObamaCare, there is no possibility of a legislative “fix.”
Mr. Obama has claimed that the nuclear deal and Iran’s terrorist adventures are separate issues. If you like your Iran nuclear deal, you can keep it. But no voter anywhere will distinguish between the “good” Iran and the Middle East’s bad boys.
In the week wide-eyed Senate Democrats piled onto Mr. Obama’s Iran bus, Hillary Clinton naturally gave a speech hedging her support: “It’s not enough to just say yes to this deal. We have to say, ‘Yes—and.’ ” She knows what the public’s word-cloud for the mullahs would be: untrustworthy, dishonest, dangerous.
Meanwhile, some House Republicans are threatening to take back ownership of the Iran deal’s political fate even before Democrats have to face voters next year. Anytime people want to run on something that has 21% support, only a fool would try to stop them.
Write to henninger@wsj.com
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4)Subject: FW: POLITICO: House set to sue Obama over Iran deal non-compliance -- WaPo: Yesterday's DC district court ruling establishes legal basis for suit
The Senate just voted 58-42 on cloture, indicating there will not be a full vote on disapproval.
Please see Omri’s important analysis below on what’s going on in the House.
_____________________________________________________
From: Omri Ceren [mailto:omric@theisraelproject.org]
Subject: POLTICO: House set to sue Obama over Iran deal non-compliance -- WaPo: Yesterday's DC district court ruling establishes legal basis for suit
Subject: POLTICO: House set to sue Obama over Iran deal non-compliance -- WaPo: Yesterday's DC district court ruling establishes legal basis for suit
Yesterday - for more or less the first time in the history of the Republic - a federal court held that the legislature has standing to sue the executive for stomping on its Article I prerogatives (this is the House vs. Burwell case about Obamacare). A few hours after the ruling Eugene Kontorovich - Washington Post legal blogger,
Northwestern University constitutional law professor, etc. - tweeted that the House's win might have created "an opening for House challenge to" the Iran deal [a].
Early this afternoon things began to fall into place.
-- POLITICO reported that House Speaker John Boehner may sue President Obama - legal action is "an option that's very possible" - because the President has not complied with Congressional legislation requiring that he turn over all documents relevant to the Iran deal, which is the prerequisite for starting a time-bound Congressional review process of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which is the prerequisite for allowing the President to lift sanctions on Iran. Short version: the Obama administration has not turned over the side deals between Iran and the IAEA, and so the Corker clock has not started, and so it's illegal for the President to waive sanctions.
-- A few minutes after the POLITICO piece went live, Kontorovich published an analysis at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog concluding that the Burwell ruling did indeed create "a major and previously unanticipated opening for a congressional lawsuit challenging the [JCPOA]." The legal argument is a little bit more subtle than the usual 'Corker clock hasn't started' arguments. It begins in the usual place: the 60 day review process hasn't started because the Iran-IAEA side deals haven't been transmitted to Congress. But the injury isn't just that waiving sanctions is illegal, which is the way the argument usually proceeds. Instead the Kontorovich argument is that Congress has been denied its Article I prerogative to exercise its legislative authority: since binding action on the JCPOA can only occur between Day 1 and Day 60 of the Corker "period of review," and since that clock hasn't started so we're not in Day 1, Congress has been denied the ability to act on the JCPOA.
Both the POLITICO and the Washington Post articles are pasted below.
White House spokesperson Earnest was asked about possible Congressional litigation at today's White House press briefing. His answer: "we've been clear that the [transmitted] documentation included all the documentation that was in the possession of the United States government" [b].
That answer is unlikely to satisfy Congress and may not pass judicial scrutiny. The White House appears to have intentionally not called for the side deals, lest they have to transmit them. Olli Heinonen - a 27 year IAEA veteran who sat atop the agency's verification shop - has explained that the U.S. could very easily call for the side deals because the U.S. is a member of the IAEA Board: "According to the IAEA rules and practices such documents could be made available to the members of the IAEA Board... If a board member asks it and others resist the distribution ... this can be overcome by a vote... Simple majority is enough, and no vetoes exist in the IAEA system." [c]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)
The Iran charade on Capitol Hill
Congress is finally having its say on the Iran deal. It will be an elaborate charade, however, because, having first gone to the United Nations, President Obama has largely drained congressional action of relevance. At the Security Council, he pushed through a resolution ratifying the deal, thus officially committing the United States as a nation to its implementation — in advance of any congressional action.
The resolution abolishes the entire legal framework, built over a decade, underlying the international sanctions against Iran. A few months from now, they will be gone.
The script is already written: The International Atomic Energy Agency, relying on Iran’s self-inspection (!) of its most sensitive nuclear facility, will declare Iran in compliance. The agreement then goes into effect and Iran’s nuclear program is officially deemed peaceful.
Sanctions are lifted. The mullahs receive $100 billion of frozen assets as a signing bonus. Iran begins reaping the economic bonanza, tripling its oil exports and welcoming a stampede of foreign companies back into the country.
It is all precooked. Last month, Britain’s foreign secretary traveled to Tehran with an impressive delegation of British companies ready to deal. He was late, however. The Italian and French foreign ministers had already been there, accompanied by their own hungry businessmen and oil companies. Iran is back in business.
As a matter of constitutional decency, the president should have submitted the deal to Congress first. And submitted it as a treaty. Which it obviously is. No international agreement in a generation matches this one in strategic significance and geopolitical gravity.
Obama did not submit it as a treaty because he knew he could never get the constitutionally required votes for ratification. He’s not close to getting two-thirds of the Senate. He’s not close to getting a simple majority. No wonder: In the latest Pew Research Center poll, the American people oppose the deal by a staggering 28-point margin.
To get around the Constitution, Obama negotiated a swindle that requires him to garner a mere one-third of one house of Congress. Indeed, on Thursday, with just 42 Senate supporters — remember, a treaty requires 67 — the Democrats filibustered and prevented, at least for now, the Senate from voting on the deal at all.
But Obama two months ago enshrined the deal as international law at the U.N. Why should we care about the congressional vote? In order to highlight the illegitimacy of Obama’s constitutional runaround and thus make it easier for a future president to overturn the deal, especially if Iran is found to be cheating.
As of now, however, it is done. Iran will be both unleashed — sanctions lifted, economy booming, with no treaty provisions regarding its growing regional aggression and support for terrorists — and welcomed as a good international citizen possessing a peaceful nuclear program. An astonishing trick.
Iran’s legitimation will not have to wait a decade, after which, as the Iranian foreign minister boasts, the U.N. file on the Iranian nuclear program will be closed, all restrictions will be dropped and, asObama himself has admitted, the breakout time to an Iranian bomb will become essentially zero. On the contrary. The legitimation happens now. Early next year, Iran will be officially recognized as a peaceful nuclear nation.
This is a revolution in Iran’s international standing, yet its consequences have been largely overlooked. The deal goes beyond merely leaving Iran’s nuclear infrastructure intact. Because the deal legitimizes that nuclear program as peaceful (unless proven otherwise — don’t hold your breath), it is entitled to international assistance. Hence the astonishing provision buried in Annex III, Section 10, committing Western experts to offering the Iranian program our nuclear expertise.
Specifically “training courses and workshops.” On what? Among other things, on how to protect against “sabotage.”
Imagine: We are now to protect Iran against, say, the very Stuxnet virus, developed by the NSA and Israel’s Unit 8200, that for years disrupted and delayed an Iranian bomb.
Secretary of State John Kerry has darkly warned Israel to not even think about a military strike on the nuclear facilities of a regime whose leader said just Wednesday that Israel will be wiped out within 25 years. The Israelis are now being told additionally — Annex III, Section 10 — that if they attempt just a defensive, nonmilitary cyberattack (a Stuxnet II), the West will help Iran foil it.
Ask those 42 senators if they even know about this provision. And how they can sign on to such a deal without shame and revulsion.
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