Voting “no” on approval of Obama's pact will avoid the filibuster and supermajority provisions.
Tan, rested, and ready, members of Congress plan to vote soon on a resolution to disapprove the ObamaNuke deal with Iran. This odd procedure guarantees a moral muddle: A “yes” vote means that one is against the deal. Those who love ObamaNuke will vote “no.” Rather than vote on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action per se, Congress will weigh language that disparages it. Instead of being cut and dried, this plan is mushy and wet.
If this rejection resolution reaches the Oval Office, Obama will veto it and then cheer as a sufficient number of Democrats in the Senate, and perhaps the House, sustain his veto. If Obama can get 41 Democratic senators to filibuster the resolution, it won’t even face a vote in Capitol Hill’s upper chamber.
This approach has been cockeyed ever since Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) cooked it up last spring. Corker surely meant well, and his idea seemed novel then; it now turns out to be foolish and constitutionally very dodgy.
Beyond that, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained on NRO last week, Obama already has violated the Corker measure, which he signed last May, by not transmitting to Congress by July 19 any and all side agreements, secret deals, and third-party accords related to Iran and its nuclear ambitions.
RELATED: Obama’s Iran Deal Is Still Far From Settled
One such measure, as the Associated Press revealed, allows the ayatollahs to self-inspect their Parchin nuclear-research facility and alert the International Atomic Energy Agency if anything fishy is afoot. To fathom the idiocy that Obama expects Congress to swallow, imagine Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer assuring Emperor Hirohito in July 1945 that the Los Alamos laboratory was just a toy factory.
#share#Despite Corker’s requirements, the ObamaNuke deal’s secret nooks and crannies remain hidden from Congress. For these reasons and more, the Republican congressional leadership should abandon this absurdity. Instead, House speaker John Boehner should instruct the House to vote on a motion to approve the ObamaNuke deal. It will fail.
If Obama proceeds with his legacy-lusting pact with the devils in Tehran, he will have to do so unilaterally, as fits his autocratic nature.
The Senate should vote on an identical motion of approval. The Democrats do not have enough votes to pass such a measure in the Senate either. If they filibuster that motion, they will block legislation designed to authorize ObamaNuke, meaning that no vote of approval could be taken. Either this rotten deal would go down to outright defeat, or Democrats themselves will stop it by blocking ObamaNuke from coming up for approval.
In either case, Congress will have given Obama an honest, open chance to pass his blessed “deal,” and it will have sunk on Capitol Hill.
RELATED: Some ‘Victory’ — Two-Thirds of the Senate and the Public Opposes Obama’s Iran Deal
At that point, Obama can get the message and back off from this destructive fiasco, or he can proceed with ObamaNuke against the express wishes of the United State House of Representatives, the United States Senate, and 55 percent of the American people, according to an August 25 Quinnipiac survey. (Only 25 percent of respondents favored ObamaNuke.)
#related#If Obama proceeds with his legacy-lusting pact with the devils in Tehran, he will have to do so unilaterally, as fits his autocratic nature. This will strip his actions of all moral basis and make it even easier for his successor to yank America from a “deal” that both the ayatollahs and White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough consider, in McDonough’s words, “non-binding.”
If Democrats complain about Republicans’ employing this unusual legislative strategy, the elephants should remind the donkeys that they used the reconciliation process, “deemed” ObamaCare as having passed the House, and took other unorthodox steps to sledgehammer ObamaCare down the throats of the American people. Republicans should use their power to prevent ObamaNuke from similarly being force-fed to this nation’s population. Given the results of the 2014 midterm elections, the Republicans’ battle cry should paraphrase Obama’s dismissive words to them from January 2009: “We won.”
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.