Latest in Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act
“Anyone who hoped that Iran’s nuclear agreement with the United States and other powers portended a new era of openness with the West has been jolted with a series of increasingly rude awakenings over the past few weeks,” Thomas Erdbrink reported earlier this week in the NYT.
This past week, George Jahn of the AP published an exclusive, and damning, look at the Iran-IAEA agreement about inspections at Parchin.
Andrew McCarthy is once again blaming the poor Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act for Congress’s inability to stop the President from implementing the Iran deal. McCarthy is not the only one doing so.
Colum Lynch and John Hudson have an article in Foreign Policy provocatively entitled “Obama Turns to U.N. to Outmaneuver Congress” in which they suggest that the new U.N. Security Council Resolution likely to be adopted next week will tie the hands of future Presidents and that the United States would violate the Resolution if Congress votes down the Iran nuclear deal.
When critics of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act are confronted with the fact that the Act delays the President's ability to implement U.S. sanctions relief under the Iran Deal for 60 days, they sometimes switch to arguments about why the politics of the Review Act are nonetheless bad.
So the Iran deal is done, and now we can move to debate it. It is very important to note that but for the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, President Obama could have lifted U.S. sanctions today under waivers and related provisions that Congress in the past gave him.
On Sunday, an overwhelming majority of the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, voted to ban access by IAEA inspectors to all military sites, documents and scientists. As one might imagine, that sort of access is crucial for understanding the nature and lawfulness of Iran’s program.