A minor earthquake hit the Capitol and the White House on Tuesday, with reverberations all the way to Tehran.
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted unanimously — Democrats as well as Republicans — in favor of a bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., giving Congress the right to continue to impose sanctions on Iran if the Obama administration's agreement with the Islamic Republic lacks adequate safeguards.
The bill was crafted with the help of Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland, usually an Obama partisan; and the unanimous vote was a significant sign that Obama's prospective nuclear deal with Iran is losing luster with members of his own party. The vote presages a potential veto-proof majority of Democrats and Republicans supporting the bill in the full Senate, backed by a similar majority in the House.
The message to Obama: We don't trust you to do a deal without some congressional review and oversight. It's a stinging rebuke from fellow Democrats that he won't soon forget.
Critics of Obama's dealings with Iran complain the Corker bill doesn't really change anything. They point out Obama is still free to do a deal with Iran as he, not Congress, sees fit. A possible amendment by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate to approve any agreement as a formal treaty, was dropped without a vote.
Also, Iran is still free not to recognize Israel's right to exist (that proposed amendment from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was dropped) and still free to engage in terrorism without breaking a nuclear deal (that one from Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso was defeated).
All the same, the complainers are wrong. This time, the good guys really did win and the bad guys, including Tehran, lost.
Corker's bill substantially achieves the same aim as the earlier Corker-Menendez bill and even Johnson's amendment. It gives Congress the power to step in after a deal is signed but before the administration implements it, with the same two-thirds majority weighing in to override any presidential veto of a refusal to lift sanctions, rather than voting for a formal treaty.
You may control the deal, Mr. President, the bill says; but we in Senate and Congress will make the call on lifting sanctions. With Tehran absolutely firm on lifting sanctions as a precondition for a final agreement, a Senate that smells a rat can halt the entire process, even if the United Nations lifts its sanctions at Obama's prodding.
Corker's achievement was to craft the language so that it drew broad bipartisan support — so broad (one convert was Sen. Barbara Boxer of California) that the White House had to back down on its repeated threats to veto the bill. That's imagination and leadership, in a GOP Congress that often seems to lack both.
The big loser, meanwhile, is the president. After threatening a veto day after day, and with John Kerry bad mouthing the bill in private even as it was being voted on, Obama was compelled to agree to sign it after a final vote. The White House tried to pretend it got substantial concessions, like dropping the language linking sanctions to Iranian terrorism (according to sources Corker remarked if Iran starts killing Americans it'll get missiles not sanctions) and cutting the review period from 60 days to 30 days. But even the New York Times, which savaged the bill as "reckless," had to admit Obama got his head handed to him.
The Obama-Kerry negotiations with Iran rest on a bed of self-delusion wrapped in a blanket of lies — lies about ending Iran's nuclear capabilities (they get to keep their uranium enrichment program); lies about Tehran's timeline to a nuclear bomb; lies about "snapping back" sanctions if Iran cheats.
The vote by Democrats for the bill is a sign that they too now sense the Obama policy on Iran is headed for disaster, and that they have to at least keep their options open, even if they don't oppose Obama outright, if only as a matter of political self-preservation.
That's an earthquake. Time will tell if it's too small to really shake things up, but it's the first major hopeful sign from this Congress — and the first indication that there may be another outcome in our dealings with Iran besides catastrophe.