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The Iran Deal: Choosing Sides
Geraldo Rivera on Fox Business just now, rebuking critics of the Iran deal:
Too bad, we are moving forward. This is not an existential threat to Israel or any place else. This is the future.
On Facebook, our own Mona Charen:
This is a shameful, terrible day for our country. President Obama and his party are the Neville Chamberlains of our time. Every American should call and write his congressman and senators to urge a veto override. This is the worst betrayal of this country one can imagine. It would be treason if committed by someone other than the president.
I’m with Mona.
You?
Published in Foreign Policy, General
Good for Mona, but the Corker bill has assured Obama a Congressional fig leaf. HRC will back this agreement and the idea that Democrats will vote to not sustain a veto 14 months prior to an election is fantasy. I believe the GOP’s handling of this is the 10,232nd reason of why I am not a Republican. This is a typical political farce that will probably be more damaging than most of the others nothing more nothing less. A congress is a group of baboons. In my opinion this Congress gives baboons a bad name.
The idea that any establishment Republican will fix this mess is pathetic. It is about time mush moderates wake up.
100% with Mona.
You’re treating treaties and Executive Agreements as though they’re the same thing. They’re not. The President can conclude an Executive Agreement with pretty much anyone he wants. It can cover pretty much anything he wants. And it has very little, if any, legal force. The Executive Agreement Obama has concluded with Iran requires actual laws to be passed and other actual laws to be rescinded, and Congress is in no way obligated to do either. Obama could sign a disarmament Executive Agreement (why limit it to nuclear weapons?) with Putin tomorrow. Congress would have, from that, exactly zero obligation to pass legislation or rescind other legislation that would be necessary to carry the thing into law. Or even into effect.
In most cases, Presidents work with Congress, so the legislation needed to give the Agreement effectivity also could be enacted. Even at that, the President, or any subsequent President, can withdraw from the Agreement at will (although any passed legislation would be useful also to be undone–by Congress).
In order for an agreement to have the force of law, to become part of the Law of the Land, it needs to be an actual treaty, with actual Senate concurrence. At that point, the content of the treaty are law and last until the law is rescinded–by Congress.
Treaties aren’t defined by their duration, unless that duration is included in the treaty itself. Only Executive Agreements have the duration a President (or within the next 18 months (because I’m optimistic about getting a Republican President in ’17) for the Iran thing, Congress) gives it.
Executive Agreements may indeed have bad, long-lasting consequences. But treating this as a treaty, with Senate concurrence, would have no effect whatsoever on the ability to rebuild international sanctions. Other nations aren’t bound by our Senate, only by the content of an agreed treaty–one that’s also ratified by those other nations via their procedures. Were the treaty to fail, as this Executive Agreement is bound to do, we’d still have the same problem rebuilding those international sanctions, if not greater difficulty from the other nations’ still extant treaty obligations. Alternatively, if this were presented as a treaty, and the Senate rejected it, the other nations party to the treaty would still dismantle the international sanctions regime and free up the money under their control. We can, though, “easily” re-emplace unilateral sanctions with or without the Executive Agreement. It’s the same with the money. Between an Executive Agreement and a Treaty, other nations’ treatment of sanctions and money are a wash.
Should the Senate (any Senate, not just one more or less conveniently disposed to our particular point of view) have a say in this thing? It does. The Corker bill. But Congress has no authority to force any President to present an agreement as a treaty.
With the present Congress, the sanctions that are presently US law are unlikely to be lifted; although it’s my surmise that Obama will try to find ways to circumvent that law or outright disregard it. The money that is sequestered by law is unlikely to be released by changing the law; although it’s my surmise that Obama will try to find ways to circumvent this law or outright disregard it, also. That’s unaffected by a treaty/Executive Agreement question.
Eric Hines
I seem to recall there being a treaty called something like the Nuclear Arms Non-Proliferation Treaty (hereafter “NPT”).
Iran has been in violation of that treaty for many years. Hence the many sancti0ns imposed on the regime.
The Vienna Agreement will ratify Iran’s nuclear arms program and immunize it for any consequences arising from those violations. In effect the NPT is being amended for the benefit of Iran.
If you amend a treaty, I think the agreement to do so has to be given the status of a treaty.
This argument is in addition to that raised by Andrew McCarthy this past Friday that the Corker bill is not applicable to the Vienna Agreement because it was passed on the premise that Obama was negotiating an agreement on Iran’s nuclear arms program. He did that and he capitulated to Khamenei on the conventional weapons embargo and ICBM development. So the Vienna agreement is way beyond the scope of Corker.
Finally, all nuclear arms agreements in the past 50-60 years have been done as treaties. That’s called a precedent.
I think voters should throw everything into the mix with the Democrat Senators and Reps who are going to be crucial in the next eight weeks. Everyone here who has a Dem Senator or Rep. needs to be raising holy hell with him now and during the August recess. Now is important because Obama wants to immediately go to the Security Council to get a “binding resolution” passed there to implement Vienna.
That looks like a treaty to me.
In 2017 he will argue that the U.S. is bound “by international law” to comply with that resolution, even though it’s not a treaty. He’ll be Khamenei’s lawyer and we’ll be paying him $200,000 a year to do it.