What an astonishing situation is shaping up in the US Senate. The chamber is controlled by the Democrats, yet it looks like it is nearing a veto-proof majority for an Iran sanctions bill that amounts to, among other things, a vote of no confidence in the leader of the Democratic Party, President Obama.
The bill’s aim is to approve in advance a return to sanctions against the Iranians if they fail to meet the agreement that Secretary of State John Kerry and the Europeans (or do I repeat myself?) just inked in Geneva. If the Iranians fail to keep their word, the bill would impose an even tougher sanctions regime.
This has certainly set off the party foghorns. The Washington Post (which years ago bailed out on the Vietnam war in such a fashion that its editor, J. Russell Wiggins, left the paper, advising a colleague, “Keep your hat handy”) says it sees the logic of the bill, which would put pressure on Iran, but still frets that it would be “problematic.”
The Los Angeles Times is upset that the bill would express the “sense of Congress” that America should “stand with Israel” if it launches a military attack on Iran. The New York Times warns of “dangerously misguided forces” in the Senate. USAToday reckons the bill has so many sponsors that Iran will get the message without Congress actually passing the bill. (Why, then, do we need Congress to vote on anything?)
The foghorns were blowing in 1938, too, after Britain’s Neville Chamberlain gave Adolph Hitler everything he was asking for at the Munich conference in exchange for “peace in our time. In an editorial typical of the time, The Washington Post enthused, “The wings of death have grazed the faces of countless millions,” a fate supposedly averted by Chamberlain’s appeasement of the dictator. It went on, “If men of every nation cannot learn from this experience, then is the common heritage of Western civilization doomed.”
What seems to have startled today’s apostles of appeasement is the number of senators who’ve signed on as sponsors of the sanctions bill — at least 58, including 15 or more members of Obama’s own party. They include New York Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, for whom this is a critical moment.
Schumer, after all, is maneuvering to be Senate majority leader. That’s his career ambition. Harry Reid, the current leader, is carrying the president’s water by refusing to allow a vote on this bill, which makes this an acid test of Schumer’s ability. So far the real leadership among Democrats has come from New Jersey’s Bob Menendez.
It’s hard to think of a previous situation quite like this, where a Senate controlled by the president’s party is challenging its own president on a major foreign-policy initiative.
Clearly President Obama sees this. The White House has been growing more strident by the day, questioning even the integrity of legislators backing the sanctions bill.
“If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so,” is how the spokesman for Obama’s National Security Council put it, claiming the Senate bill would make it “more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran’s nuclear program to proceed.”
The reason the White House has gotten so strident is that it knows that what the Senate is doing amounts to a vote of no-confidence in the president himself.
It’s not a matter of not trusting Iran. No one — not even a single European — trusts the Iranian regime. What’s animating the Senate is a distrust of Obama.
He’s been vowing to get tough with Iran his whole presidency. He’s promised, in respect of using the military, to keep all options on the table. He’s insisted he’s got Israel’s back. But the Iranians have spent the first three quarters of his presidency spinning their centrifuges to prepare an A-bomb, and now Obama has entered a deal that will tie our hands — and Israel’s.
The thing to remember is that what Kerry is bringing back from Geneva is not a treaty — not what the Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land,” as a treaty or the Menendez bill would be.
Of course, if Kerry’s deal were a treaty, requiring ratification, it wouldn’t get to first base in the Senate. That in and of itself ought to be a warning.