Don’t throw me in that briar patch

The New York Times is exercised about the “reckless” legislation approved in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday that would give Congress an opportunity to vote on an Iran nuclear agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by the end of June. The American Iranian Council is also uncomfortable. The Administration is “not thrilled” but the President won’t use his veto, which likely would be overridden.

I think Congressional review of the nuclear deal is a good thing, for several reasons.

The process is unlikely to derail an agreement, since the President could exercise his veto if the Congress disapproves. Mustering a two-thirds majority to override such a veto on a deal that verifiably stalls Iran’s progress towards nuclear weapons for 10 years or more is going to be difficult. I can hope that at least a third of the Congress will look objectively at the situation and consider carefully the alternatives, though I won’t be surprised if someone writes to remind me of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s influence and Woodrow Wilson’s failure to get approval for the League of Nations.

Without a Congressional vote, the deal would be entirely dependent on executive action. As my SAIS colleague Eric Edelman points out, it would be odd indeed if the Iranian Majles and the UN Security Council got to vote on the deal and not the US Congress. Can a democracy not match those two less than fully democratic institutions in allowing a vote? Of course it is precisely because they are not democratic that they can be relied upon to approve the deal. But that is the trouble with democracy: it needs to live up to its own standards.

There is certainly no constitutional requirement for Congress to act. Presidential authority over foreign relations is strong. Executive agreements are the rule, not the exception. But if a deal runs the Congressional gauntlet without too much damage, it would then become nigh on impossible for a future president to undo it, as Republican presidential nominees are promising to do. This is important. Why would Iran’s Supreme Leader take the risk of signing on if there is a 50/50 chance, more or less, that the next president will renege? This legislation makes the odds more like 80/20, which strengthens the hand of our negotiators and enables them to insist credibly on an agreement that can pass muster in Congress.

Dan Drezner hopes for parallels between the nuclear agreement and NAFTA, which in 2008 Democratic candidates were promising to renegotiate. That was a campaign promise quickly forgotten. I don’t find that particularly comforting. Marco Rubio seems a lot more determined and consistent in opposing the nuclear deal than Democrats were in opposing NAFTA. Being older than Dan, I might recall the 1977 Panama Canal treaty, which was the subject of even greater hyperbole. None of the dire consequences predicted have come to pass. We have continued to use the canal, which is now being widened to accommodate its customers.

I hope I can be forgiven for the title of this piece. But it does strike me that the Republicans have inadvertently put the Administration in precisely the place it should want to be.