Where’s the GOP Resistance to Biden’s Russia–Iran Deal?

O ne would think that President Biden’s soon-to-be-announced Russia–Iran nuclear deal would be meeting with more Republican outrage.

In early February, weeks before Iran’s Russian patron launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, 33 Republican senators sent the White House a letter about the nuclear deal being negotiated in Vienna. The senators warned that there would be hell to pay if Biden tried to cut a deal with the mullahs without providing full disclosure to, and seeking approval from, Congress.

Since then, as I related in a column on Saturday, astonishing details have emerged about the extent to which the Biden administration has relied on the good graces of Vladimir Putin’s monstrous regime to intercede with the Iranians, who won’t meet directly with American envoys no matter how much they grovel.

With Russian forces now brutalizing Ukrainian civilians, committing patent war crimes that the president thus far declines to acknowledge as such, one might expect to find congressional Republicans raising hell regarding the imminent agreement. Biden contemplates pumping hundreds of billions in sanctions-relief dollars into the coffers of the Russia-backed global leader in sponsoring terrorism. The deal would reportedly lift sanctions on Iranian officials complicit in the killing of hundreds of Americans in such infamous atrocities as Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and its 1996 bombing of a compound housing U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia.

It would be an overstatement to say Republicans have been silent in the face of the new revelations about Russia’s role in Biden’s deal. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, in conjunction with Michael McCaul, the ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, fired off a letter on Friday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In it, they admonished Blinken that federal law requires congressional review of any American agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Specifically, they cited the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), enacted in connection with the Obama/Biden administration’s original, disastrous Iran deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The point of the McCarthy–McCaul letter was to counter the Biden administration’s reported scheme to evade congressional review. As I noted in my column on Saturday, the administration apparently takes the position that its new deal is not new at all, but merely a return to the JCPOA, which Congress has already reviewed and, which thus, Biden’s reasoning goes, need not be re-submitted for additional review.

This is an absurd position. President Trump took the United States out of the JCPOA, so the original deal as such no longer exists. Between Trump’s decision to withdraw from the deal and now, Iran has flouted its JCPOA obligations and zoomed ahead with enrichment, not only generating quantities of uranium refined closer than ever to weapons-grade, but also gaining technical knowledge that cannot be unlearned. The conditions of the JCPOA have been superseded; the deal cannot be restored.

Moreover, Biden’s agreement would outrageously provide Iran with relief from sanctions meant to punish the mullahs for activities — such as terrorism, regional aggression, and ballistic-missile development — that were intentionally cordoned off from the JCPOA.

It would be ridiculous to contend that this is just the old wine in a new cask; it’s a brand-new deal. But it shares with the JCPOA the embarrassing facts that (1) it will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; (2) it will not require Iran to foreswear its terrorism promotion in order to get relief, but it will require the United States to assist Iran in the development of a large-scale nuclear-power program (for civilian purposes only of course); and 3) it will facilitate extensive Russian commerce with Iran and designate Moscow as the repository of Tehran’s enriched uranium.

If Republicans’ response to the JCPOA is any guide, however, we have reason to be worried about their response to Biden’s deal. Under the guidance of then-senator Bob Corker, who led the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, the Senate GOP facilitated President Obama’s gambit by giving it the patina of congressional approval. The mechanism for this was the aforementioned INARA, touted in both recent letters to the administration from Republican lawmakers. (See one of my many columns summarizing INARA’s defects, here.) As it turned out, this farcical legislation did not even do what Corker vowed it would do — namely, force Obama to disclose the full JCPOA agreement to Congress. As the Obama–Biden administration shrewdly structured the JCPOA, critical aspects of it were framed as “side agreements” between Iran and the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Biden and Blinken are clearly planning a repeat of this artifice, which would enable them to claim that, since the U.S. is supposedly not a party to those “side agreements,” they need not be shared with or approved by Congress.

Beyond that, the INARA mainly and maddeningly reversed the Constitution’s presumption against international agreements. Because the Framers were skeptical of foreign entanglements, they called for such agreements to be submitted to the Senate for approval as treaties before they could be ratified. The Constitution’s treaty clause provides that such an agreement does not have the force of law unless it achieves two-thirds’ supermajority approval. Otherwise, to have legal teeth, the terms of an international agreement must be enacted by ordinary legislation (i.e., passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president). So appalling was the JCPOA that Obama never considered trying to submit it to the Senate as a treaty, or to propose that the full Congress — then in firm Republican control — pass it into law.

Corker’s legislation, to the contrary, purported, passively, to allow the president to put his agreement into effect unless there was a two-thirds’ supermajority for disapproval (that is, enough to override a certain Obama veto of any disapproval resolution). Meantime, the Obama–Biden administration, having ignored the Constitution’s requirements, got its Iran deal rubber-stamped by the U.N. Security Council, whose members eagerly anticipated lucrative trade with Tehran. Thus, though the JCPOA was technically an unenforceable multilateral executive agreement, Obama and Biden were able to project it as bearing Congress’s imprimatur and the status of international law.

With this embarrassing history recounted, congressional Republicans’ apparently muted response to news of Biden’s impending deal may make more sense than it would seem to at first glance: Russia’s integral role should make a bad Iran deal even harder for Biden to defend as a matter of politics, but attacking it would require GOP lawmakers to dredge up their role in getting us to this point. The aforementioned letter by 33 Republican touts the treaty clause while avoiding discussion of how Republicans helped Obama and Biden navigate around it the last time. And both that letter and the McCarthy–McCaul letter remind the Biden administration of INARA’s disclosure obligations, without recounting that INARA was responsible for undermining treaty-clause opposition to the JCPOA, and that it proved utterly ineffective in forcing the Obama administration to fully disclose the deal to Congress.

Hopefully, Republicans will get properly angry about Biden’s deal before it’s too late. But you may have your answer if you’re wondering why there’s not a full-scale mutiny on Capitol Hill over Biden’s unabashed collusion with our Russian adversary — even as it is ravaging Ukraine — in order to complete a deal that empowers and enriches our Iranian adversary.

While out of one side of the Biden administration’s mouth it promises a sanctions crackdown that will reduce Russia to international-pariah status, out of the other side it speaks about continuing our strategic cooperation with Russia in areas of “shared interest” — which, it laughably contends, include making sure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons, an aim that Biden’s deal would not achieve and that there’s no reason to believe Moscow is committed to achieving. Meantime, while Biden continues to hamstring American fossil-fuel production in order to mollify his party’s woke-progressive base, he simultaneously pleads with every rogue regime under the sun to step up production with oil prices now skyrocketing above $120 per barrel. So to Iran and Russia, we can now add Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

You can’t even make this stuff up.