Facing presidential veto, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell calls special debate on accord ahead of September vote
WASHINGTON — Republican leaders in Congress announced Tuesday that lawmakers would vote in September on parallel resolutions rejecting the nuclear deal with Iran, upping the stakes for the Obama administration to garner support for the accord.
California Republican Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Tuesday introduced a bill disapproving of the nuclear deal, currently the focus of intense lobbying on Capitol Hill.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy confirmed that the House would vote on Royce’s resolution in September.
“It is clear that this is a bad deal, and the House will vote on disapproval in September,” McCarthy said in a statement.
“Everything we have learned about this agreement has given Congress and the American people cause for grave concern,” he said. “Iran still has a legitimate path to a nuclear bomb, Iranian leaders and the Obama Administration have expressed major public disagreements on key tenets of the deal, and ‘snapback’ sanctions are a fallacy. What’s worse, at least two side deals have been made between Iran and the [IAEA] and, thus far, the Obama Administration has refused to share the text of the side deals with Congress.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also announced Tuesday that he would hold a special debate in September for the upper house of Congress to discuss the agreement reached last month between world powers and Tehran. Committee hearings, he suggested, would be cancelled to allow all senators to take part.
“I’ll be trying to get the Senate to have a debate in which we have time set up for each senator to speak, and we’ll be asking for each senator to remain at their desk during the debate and actually listen to each other during the course of the debate, leading to a final vote,” McConnell said. “I think this issue is of such magnitude that I hope we will not be having committee meetings – we’ll actually have a debate that rises to the occasion that this seems to require.”
Congress is in the midst of a 60-day review period of the deal, reached last month between the P5+1 countries and the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the end of the period, both Houses are expected to vote on either a resolution of approval or disapproval.
Under the Iran Nuclear Review Act, a resolution of disapproval would block the US from upholding its nuclear deal obligations regarding sanctions relief. If the vote is on a resolution of disapproval – and passes with a veto-proof majority – the president won’t be able to lift some of the sanctions against Tehran. A failed vote of approval was seen as the lower-stakes — and thus easier-to-pass — option for Republican lawmakers.
Obama has promised to veto any vote of disapproval, but legislators can block the veto if it garners a two-thirds majority. In the Senate, that means that 13 Democrats must jump ship from the president’s party line in order for the resolution to be unstoppable.
But on Tuesday, the possibility of passing such a resolution in the upper chamber became slightly more elusive. Democratic Senators Tim Kaine, Barbara Boxer, and Bill Nelson all announced that they would support the deal in a Senate vote.
While Kaine and Boxer were already considered likely “yes” votes for the deal, Nelson was deemed a swing vote – possibly one of the dozen or so Senators who could vote against the White House.
“As dangerous a threat as Iran is to Israel and our allies, it would pale in comparison to the threat posed to them and to us by a nuclear-armed Iran,” Nelson said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
As reported by The Times of Israel