Make Obama Shut Down Government Over Iran Deal | [site:name]

As the curtain falls on Fiscal Year 2015, Congress should send Obama a new spending bill that gives him all the funding he wants, with one exception: no $150 billion bailout to Iran’s al-Qaeda-coddling ayatollahs.

After such a measure has passed the House and Senate, departing Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Kentucky) should not rely on anonymous aides to transmit this measure to Obama. Instead, the entire GOP congressional leadership physically should travel to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with scores of journalists in tow, and hand deliver the enrolled bill to the West Gate of the White House. American news viewers will see this dramatic proof that Congress did its job and provided the funds to keep the government running. This evidence will remain on videotape for constant TV replay in the weeks ahead.

Inside the Oval Office, Obama will face a choice:

If he signs a budget that excludes the $150 billion terrorist bailout, the wretched Iran-nuke deal mercifully will implode.

If Obama vetoes that spending plan, he will shut down the government in defense of sending a cash bonanza to a pro-al-Qaeda regime. That would be his choice, and conservatives and Republicans should relish giving him and his Democrat supporters the opportunity to explain their thinking to the American people.

Republicans and thinking Democrats can respond: “Obama padlocked the Washington Monument because he wants Republicans to help him give $150 billion to al-Qaeda’s allies in Iran. We won’t let that happen.”

Support for this deal — at just one in five respondents, according to a recent Pew Research survey — will fall even further, as the American people suddenly learn much more about Obama’s desperate, idiotic, and potentially deadly quest to ship $150 billion in unfrozen Iranian assets to Tehran. Obama pursues this catastrophic gambit even as he freely admits, “Some of that money will flow to activities that we object to” — namely, business as usual for Earth’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism.

As Americans fathom the ugly truth, that Obama shut down the federal government to preserve this boneheaded scheme, they will demand that he stop this nonsense. If so, he eventually will cave and the ObamaNuke deal will die.

I discussed all of this in depth on NRO last week, as well as on Stuart Varney’s program on the Fox Business Network.

Why have this showdown with Obama over his $150 billion terrorist bailout rather than on defunding Planned Parenthood?

Like millions of Americans, I want Planned Parenthood to lose its federal subsidies. To the degree that such subsidies should exist at all, they should go to women’s health centers that perform mammograms, pap smears, and similar medical services without also killing children.

The barbarians at Planned Parenthood should be prevented from carving up babies and trafficking their body parts for fun and profit. If they cannot be stopped, they at least should conduct this heinous carnage with their own money.

That said, Obama and the Left will fight like cornered rats to keep that cash flowing — along with some or all of the eight Senate Republicans who joined Democrats last Thursday against proceeding with a Planned Parenthood–free federal funding bill. They were: New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, Maine’s Susan Collins, Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, Nevada’s Dean Heller, Illinois’ Mark Kirk, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Nebraska’s Ben Sasse. (West Virginia’s Joe Manchin was the only Senate Democrat to stand with Republicans on this losing, 47–52 cloture vote.)

The 50 percent of Americans who now call themselves pro-choice largely will oppose a government shutdown over Planned Parenthood.

In contrast, only 21 percent of Americans back the Iran-nuke deal. So, on Obama’s $150 billion terrorist bailout, 79 percent of the country either agrees with the congressional Republicans’ unanimous opposition to this horrid deal (49 percent) or they are neutral (30 percent).

#share#A shutdown fight over this issue will shove it to the very center of today’s political debate. The whole country soon will learn lots more about Obama’s plan to send $150 billion to al-Qaeda’s pals in Iran. Americans will become increasingly disgusted and appalled. At some point, Obama will have to buckle.

Also, from a pro-life standpoint, Planned Parenthood is indisputably evil and disgusting. Continuing taxpayer funding to these monsters potentially could kill, perhaps, 358,000 babies next year (about as many as the 357,653 whom Planned Parenthood killed in 2013).

However, according to the Stevens Institute of Technology’s chilling Nukemap devastation simulator, an Iranian-built atomic weapon no larger than the relatively modest, 20-kiloton “Fat Man” device that the United States dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 would kill some 541,000 people and injure 532,000 others, if an Iranian-funded terrorist exploded it in Times Square. For all Planned Parenthood’s horrors, no one ever has been butchered by walking past a clinic.

From the standpoint of protecting human life, it seems more vital to guard against 540,000 such deaths — and millions of others, if Iran builds bigger atomic bombs, and more of them — even if the price for such a pro-life policy is the maddening and vicious deaths of 380,000 pre-born American citizens.

Such cold numerical calculation is tough, but it is an inescapable part of the moral decision-making that this occasion demands.

#related#Conservatives and Republicans can win this battle easily in the House of Representatives, where Boehner’s GOP majority and that body’s simple parliamentary rules make this strategy achievable. The real challenge, of course, is in the Senate where Harry Reid continues to behave as de facto majority leader, and McConnell, who nominally holds that title, seems outfoxed and outgunned at every turn.

But if there ever were a time for McConnell to step up, heed the call of deeply frustrated Republican and conservative voters (who handed him a majority and expected much more), and squeeze the Democrats’ brass in a vise — this is the time, and this is the issue.

— 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.