Senate to vote on Iran deal, again

The agreement that was finalized last week dealt with one subject and one subject only.

“My hope is that Senate Democrats will hear from their constituents and allow an up-or-down vote on President Obama’s Iran deal this week”, Sen.

The analogy applies to more than just the short-term politics of the deal.

This is a shaky deal that does not solve anything, but merely pushes the problems several years down the road – at which point Iran will be stronger and it will be nearly impossible to reimpose global sanctions on it. As with Obamacare, even a Republican president may hesitate before tearing up the agreement once it’s working, even if imperfectly.

Regardless of McConnell’s maneuver on a politically fraught measure sure to point out up in marketing campaign advertisements and fundraising appeals, Democrats have been anticipated to once more maintain collectively and block the invoice.

But Republicans won’t be content with symbolic opposition; they’re also proposing legislation that could undermine the deal before it goes fully into effect.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, used a Monday op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail to call the Democratic block of the vote on the resolution “extremely disappointing”.

“It’s hard to see how Senators could agree with these things”.

If Corker or Rubio succeed, “the Iranians will surely react with outrage”, Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, predicted. “They enabled the president to do this without entering into a treaty, ‘” said Senator Corker.

Iran wants help from China to resolve the built up tensions and the unrest across in the Middle East. It is gearing up to host more companies from China once the sanctions imposed against it have been lifted, said the foreign minister of Iran on Tuesday.

After years of frosty relations, Netanyahu stridently opposed a deal championed by Obama as the best way of preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. This is a demand designed to be unacceptable on its face to Iran, specifically to get rejected and subsequently become the excuse for the United States to not follow the deal.

If that’s not enough, a side deal with the global Atomic Energy Agency will allow Iran to self-inspect nuclear sites rather than use worldwide inspectors.

With polls showing that public support for the Iran agreement is as low as 21 percent, Senate Republicans can quote Harry Reid’s arguments for invoking the “nuclear option” for confirming judges last session: surely having the Senate cast a vote on this treaty is way more important than confirming judges?

As Secretary of State John Kerry testified before Congress, this deal is an agreement, not a treaty, and therefore should not usurp Indiana state law and sanctions. He can’t break the filibuster on his own but he can make the Democrats’ obstruction very costly.