New Orleans Iran and the United States continue to play ping pong with missiles and air strikes while also maintaining a technical ceasefire no matter how many “bombs away,” while also at the bargaining table to nail down a real agreement from the so-called “memorandum of understanding.” The US Senate and the House have gone back and forth on resolutions demanding that Trump needs to slow his roll until he gets Congressional approval for his war. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the 60-days to come to a full and complete agreement, though the parties could certainly extend the timeframe. Who can blame anyone for being confused?
There’s another wrinkle to this mess. As much as Trump like to be the one-man band and bounces from claiming the war is over to threatening to bomb the bejesus out of Iran, according to some legal authorities he has no choice but to take any actual agreement with Iran to Congress for approval. Joshua Claybourn, a lawyer with the conservative Cato Institute writing in the Wall Street Journal notes that to contemplate anything otherwise would be…
…unlawful and unconstitutional. It would violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (Inara), which was enacted while the Obama administration was negotiating its Iran nuclear deal….Inara requires congressional review for any agreement related to Iran’s nuclear program before sanctions relief can move forward. More generally, the president can’t use diplomacy to nullify sanctions Congress enacted or disregard the limits Congress placed on his power to waive them.
Trump and his people need to understand that this is a bigger program than the ballroom or reflecting pond. This is serious and could be real trouble. No one in Congress, or much of anywhere else, is happy about Trump having so clearly lost a war that he recklessly started with Israel. Iranian hawks in Congress have not held their tongues in criticizing the MOU as anything other than wrapping gauze over a wound. The Democrats for their part were never in this thing from jump.
The backstory goes back to the Obama deal, which Trump cavalierly threw out in his first term and is now caught on the horns of dilemma in trying to get anything as good, even after his war. Republicans weren’t happy with the way Obama sidestepped them in the Iranian negotiations then, so locked the barn door for the future by passing Inara requiring they wouldn’t be left behind the door a second time.
The act also requires that Congress see the whole agreement within five days. The White House has provided a courtesy copy of the MOU, but as Claybourn points out, “Slapping ‘memorandum of understanding’ on the emerging deal with Iran doesn’t make congressional review go away.” As Claybourn writes, “…a constitutional rule that only bites when the other side is in power is a mere slogan.” The White House is claiming that the MOU is not an agreement. The agreement is in process and yet to come.
Given the way this has gone, you don’t have to be a fortune-teller to predict that in 60, 90, or whatever number of days, something or other is going to have to come to Congress. This could happen in the run-up to the November midterms, if not right smack in the middle of them. There is no way that this whole Iranian affair won’t be a huge issue along with its impacts on the economy. Finally, the demands for accountability won’t be able to be avoided, and no matter how hard Trump and his team try, not just Congress, but the voters will have their say on this whole mess then, and it won’t be pretty for the White House.