Joe Biden has wanted to get America back into a nuclear with Iran ever since Donald Trump got us out of the original deal, which was brokered by Barack Obama.
Of course, that deal was never genuinely legal in the first place. The U.S. was never a legal signatory because the United States Senate never ratified the treaty. Barack Obama, who got us into the deal back in 2015, did so unilaterally. The deal was widely panned for giving too many concessions to Iran and providing them a clear path to developing nuclear weapons. There was bipartisan opposition to it, so there wasn’t a chance that Obama would be able to get the two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to ratify it. So Obama simply pretended it wasn’t a treaty and therefore didn’t require ratification.
But the Iran nuclear deal, officially called The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), absolutely met the definition of a treaty.
According to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a treaty is defined as “an international agreement concluded between [two or more] States in written form and governed by international law.” The JCPOA met that definition. Obama did not have the authority to enter the United States into that agreement unilaterally. Remember how Obama used to brag that he was a constitutional law professor? He forgot that, according to Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
As Biden is unlikely to get a two-thirds majority of the Senate to back his new deal, we know he won’t bother to seek ratification and will instead claim the same unilateral executive authority that Obama did in 2015 to sign on to his version of the treaty.
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So, the question is: what will Republicans do about it?
“I think we could see a host of tools employed by multiple senators to stop this deal,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said last month. “We still don’t know the specifics of the deal, but everything we hear keeps getting worse and worse by the day. At this point, it is complete surrender to the ayatollah. It is complete surrender to Russia and Putin.”
That sounds great, but there’s little reason to have hope that Republicans can thwart Biden’s deal because they certainly didn’t do anything with Obama’s deal. Cruz also seemed to lack confidence that the Senate could stop Biden’s new nuclear deal because he pointed out that the next GOP president would simply rip it up.
“Joe Biden and the ayatollah know that whatever terrible deal they put in writing will be ripped to shreds on the very first day of the next Republican administration, which I believe will be January 20, 2025, regardless of who the Republican president is.”
He’s correct that any future president can rip up Biden’s nuclear deal with Iran if the Senate does not ratify it, but why should we wait that long? That’s potentially more than two years of sanctions lifted on Iran as they develop their nuclear capabilities, just because Biden signed a piece of paper that shouldn’t have any legal authority per the U.S. Constitution.
There is no reason why the GOP should be content to say “the next Republican president will rip up the deal,” when a president has bypassed the Senate by unilaterally signing a treaty.
The Constitution is clear. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties is clear. The GOP needs to grow an actual backbone on this and stop waiting for the next GOP president to clean up Biden’s mess. Obama argued the deal wasn’t a treaty, and Biden will do the same. Perhaps we need the Supreme Court to step in on this one?