The Patriot Post® · In Brief: GOP Resistance to Biden's Iran Deal?

“One would think that President Biden’s soon-to-be-announced Russia–Iran nuclear deal would be meeting with more Republican outrage,” says Andrew McCarthy. But for reasons he explains, that’s not happening.

In early February, weeks before Iran’s Russian patron launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, 33 Republican senators sent the White House a letter about the nuclear deal being negotiated in Vienna. The senators warned that there would be hell to pay if Biden tried to cut a deal with the mullahs without providing full disclosure to, and seeking approval from, Congress.

Since then … astonishing details have emerged about the extent to which the Biden administration has relied on the good graces of Vladimir Putin’s monstrous regime to intercede with the Iranians, who won’t meet directly with American envoys no matter how much they grovel.

With Russian forces now brutalizing Ukrainian civilians, committing patent war crimes that the president thus far declines to acknowledge as such, one might expect to find congressional Republicans raising hell regarding the imminent agreement. Biden contemplates pumping hundreds of billions in sanctions-relief dollars into the coffers of the Russia-backed global leader in sponsoring terrorism. The deal would reportedly lift sanctions on Iranian officials complicit in the killing of hundreds of Americans in such infamous atrocities as Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and its 1996 bombing of a compound housing U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia.

It would be an overstatement to say Republicans have been silent in the face of the new revelations about Russia’s role in Biden’s deal. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, in conjunction with Michael McCaul, the ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, fired off a letter on Friday to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In it, they admonished Blinken that federal law requires congressional review of any American agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Specifically, they cited the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), enacted in connection with the Obama/Biden administration’s original, disastrous Iran deal, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The point of the McCarthy–McCaul letter was to counter the Biden administration’s reported scheme to evade congressional review. … The administration apparently takes the position that its new deal is not new at all, but merely a return to the JCPOA, which Congress has already reviewed and, which thus, Biden’s reasoning goes, need not be re-submitted for additional review.

This is an absurd position. President Trump took the United States out of the JCPOA, so the original deal as such no longer exists.

McCarthy goes on to lay out some of the details in question, including the changes — favorable to Iran — that Biden is trying to make.

If Republicans’ response to the JCPOA is any guide, however, we have reason to be worried about their response to Biden’s deal. Under the guidance of then-senator Bob Corker, who led the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, the Senate GOP facilitated President Obama’s gambit by giving it the patina of congressional approval.

That was the whole fiasco of making it so that the deal required two-thirds of the Senate to disapprove rather than to ratify Obama’s deal. “So appalling was the JCPOA that Obama never considered trying to submit it to the Senate as a treaty, or to propose that the full Congress — then in firm Republican control — pass it into law,” McCarthy says. Instead, they just let him get away with it.

With this embarrassing history recounted, congressional Republicans’ apparently muted response to news of Biden’s impending deal may make more sense than it would seem to at first glance: Russia’s integral role should make a bad Iran deal even harder for Biden to defend as a matter of politics, but attacking it would require GOP lawmakers to dredge up their role in getting us to this point. …

Hopefully, Republicans will get properly angry about Biden’s deal before it’s too late.

That’s because, he concludes, the new deal is just that bad:

While out of one side of the Biden administration’s mouth it promises a sanctions crackdown that will reduce Russia to international-pariah status, out of the other side it speaks about continuing our strategic cooperation with Russia in areas of “shared interest” — which, it laughably contends, include making sure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons, an aim that Biden’s deal would not achieve and that there’s no reason to believe Moscow is committed to achieving. Meantime, while Biden continues to hamstring American fossil-fuel production in order to mollify his party’s woke-progressive base, he simultaneously pleads with every rogue regime under the sun to step up production with oil prices now skyrocketing above $120 per barrel. So to Iran and Russia, we can now add Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.

You can’t even make this stuff up.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.