Ted Cruz: Republicans Will Use ‘Host of Tools’ to Kill Biden’s Iran Deal

The senator says in an interview that Biden’s Iran deal enables the murder of Americans.

T he forthcoming agreement to bring the U.S. back into the Iran nuclear deal will “to a metaphysical certainty” grant Tehran billions of dollars that “will be used to carry out the murder of Americans,” Senator Ted Cruz told National Review, while pledging that congressional Republicans will employ a range of options meant to quash it.

“I think we could see a host of tools employed by multiple senators to stop this deal,” Cruz said in an interview Wednesday. “We still don’t know the specifics of the deal, but everything we hear keeps getting worse and worse by the day. At this point, it is complete surrender to the ayatollah. It is complete surrender to Russia and Putin.”

With a last-minute Russian demand having been surmounted, and ongoing talks likely to resolve differences between the two sides on U.S. counterterrorism sanctions targeting Iranian entities, the deal is expected to be struck imminently — even amid new threats from the Iranian regime. As suggested by Cruz’s comments, an emerging GOP argument against it is that it will empower Iran to kill Americans and that the president will be directly to blame for those deaths. These concerns are all the more relevant given recent news reports that the Iranian regime is targeting former Trump officials for assassination.

“It is likely to make Joe Biden the No. 1 funder of terrorism in the world. Iran is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. They deliberately target American citizens for murder,” Cruz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said. “And Joe Biden, for whatever reason, is eager to fund terrorists trying to murder Americans.”

The administration’s expected announcement of the deal won’t be the end of it, if the senator from Texas, a veteran of the legislative scuffles surrounding the initial 2015 agreement from which the Trump administration withdrew, gets his way.

Tehran has demanded that any deal remain in effect under subsequent presidents. Biden has been more than happy to oblige, despite the fact that, according to Cruz, the deal has no chance of either being ratified as a treaty or approved by legislation as required under the Constitution.

Despite repeated inquiries from members of Congress of both parties, Biden has declined to say whether he would submit any agreement with Iran for congressional review under a 2015 law.

“Joe Biden and the ayatollah know that whatever terrible deal they put in writing will be ripped to shreds on the very first day of the next Republican administration, which I believe will be January 20, 2025, regardless of who the Republican president is.” He repeated for emphasis: “Biden and the ayatollah know it.”

Cruz made that threat in a letter last month to Biden that was co-signed by 32 other senators. “That timeline is roughly as long as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) survived implementation, and potentially even shorter,” they wrote at the time.

Even leading up to 2025, a new agreement is likely to face fierce congressional opposition, especially if Republicans win the majority in either house in the November midterm elections.

With the exception of Senator Rand Paul, a libertarian dove, this week every Republican senator signed on to a statement opposing Biden’s negotiations, accusing the administration of having “given away the store” on Iran’s nuclear buildup, terrorism, and human-rights abuses.

On the House side, the Republican Study Committee’s “Maximum Pressure Act,” a bill endorsed by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and former national-security adviser Robert O’Brien, would statutorily enshrine the Trump-era sanctions approach.

Cruz has previously used holds on Biden-administration nominees to fight policy battles in the Senate, as he did in his campaign against the White House’s stance toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. However, the policy options he noted yesterday all involved legislative proposals.

Cruz told NR that he had just filed legislation opposing the administration’s expected move to grant sanctions waivers on civilian nuclear activity. This is a major loophole that could allow Russia to evade sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine.

He also cited the counterterrorism sanctions as one likely area on which opponents of an eventual deal will train their fire. In this week’s statement, the 49 Republican senators pledged to force a vote on any effort by the administration to remove terrorism sanctions.

The Biden administration is reportedly mulling a reversal of a Trump-era move to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a “foreign terrorist organization.” But any agreement, regardless of where talks on the IRGC designation land, is expected to result in the lifting of a number of other terrorism designations. The administration is preparing to lift sanctions on at least 112 individuals and organizations linked to terrorist attacks and human-rights atrocities, according to Gabriel Noronha, a former State Department official.

Republicans aren’t alone in raising the alarm about reversing these sanctions. In a letter last week, twelve House Democrats joined with nine Republicans to tell the president that “it is hard to envision supporting an agreement along the lines being publicly discussed.” The lawmakers, who included Democratic representatives Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) and Elaine Luria (Va.), wrote that they are “highly concerned” by the potential reversal of sanctions targeting the IRGC and the supreme leader’s office.

Without addressing Iran’s role in terrorist activities across the Middle East and by “simultaneously providing billions of dollars in sanctions relief, the United States would be providing a clear path for Iranian proxies to continue fueling terrorism,” the letter warned.

Top Biden-administration officials have said that, after concluding an initial agreement lifting sanctions, they would seek a “longer and stronger” follow-on deal with Iran to address its regional terrorism, assassination campaigns, and missile programs. The critics are less than optimistic about such a deal’s prospects.

Cruz also accused the Biden administration of failing to push back against purported Iranian assassination plots on U.S. soil targeting Pompeo, former national-security adviser John Bolton, and Brian Hook, who served as the State Department’s special envoy on Iran. The administration has “security details” on those officials, but “if they’re doing anything to push back on the assassination plots, I’m unaware of it,” he said.  

From what’s known about the impending deal, the senator draws the conclusion that “the best way to get billions of dollars from Joe Biden is to carry out a campaign of murder targeting Americans and our allies.”