Down to the short strokes

By Omri Ceren, TIP

The lobbying action picks up tomorrow. There will be a grassroots rally opposing the deal on the West Lawn of the Capitol, which will get significant coverage not just because of expected numbers – hotel rooms in town are somewhere between premium cost and unavailable – but also because Trump is scheduled to speak. Inside the office buildings hundreds of AIPAC activists will be taking meetings with lawmakers.

On Thursday the House is expected to take up its resolution of disapproval, which will pass with roughly 60% of the chamber voting for the resolution and against the Iran deal. Then the Senate will have until the 17th to move on its own resolution, though they’re out on the 14th and 15th for Rosh Hashanah mini-recess. The Senate vote count is 58 disapprove vs. 41 endorse, about the same proportion as the House. That means the battle will be over whether the administration can force enough Democrats to filibuster and prevent the President from having to veto the resolution of disapproval. Cantwell is still in play, plus there are several pro-deal Democrats who may still vote for cloture.

The political coverage, one way or another, will revolve around the spectacle of Senate Democrats having to protect the President from his own deal. Reid even offered to forgo a filibuster, and thereby force every Senate Democrat to go on the record, if McConnell would raise the threshold for a resolution to 60 and thereby eliminate the risk of passage (Reid: “Everything of importance in the Senate requires 60 votes” anyway; GOP: Reid nuked the Senate filibuster on judicial nominees and circumvented a 41 Republican minority on Obamacare after Brown was elected).

Short-term political risk: voters want Congress to reject the deal by roughly 2 to 1 margins at the national level. The NRSC spent most of August leading their “Morning Business” emails with state-by-state stories predicting doom for Senate Democrats because of the deal, and the theme has been at the top of their last 4 emails (this morning: “The Wall Street Journal reports on the fallout following Senator Michael Bennet’s decision to support President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal”). McConnell may even force a live filibuster, which in addition to being political high drama will force one Democratic Senator after another to go on camera shielding the President from his own bad deal.

Medium-term political risk: Senate Democrats are effectively placing the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credibility in the hands of the IRGC and Qassem Soleimani, who at any point over the next decade can either light up the Middle East, which will get blamed on the $100 billion provided by the deal, or pocket their economic recovery and withdraw from the nuclear deal, which will leave supporters having promoted Persian hegemony in exchange for nothing.

The administration has a policy pretense for forcing Democrats to take the political hit: they’re telling lawmakers that Iran will walk away from the deal if it looks like Obama doesn’t have a mandate for it. The Iranians – according to this administration argument – will walk away if it looks like they need the White House to protect them from Congress, because they know that no President will ever again invest political capital on behalf of US-Iran entente. The White House acknowledges that a resolution of disapproval will deprive the President of even the pretense of a mandate, and a veto will lock in the perception that the deal lives and dies with Obama.

The administration’s problem is that it Obama doesn’t actually have a mandate for the deal, and avoiding a veto isn’t enough to preserve the pretense that he does. Peter Alexander told Matt Lauer this morning on Today that surviving Congress is more like “avoiding defeat” than a victory for the President. Even the statements given by Senators who came out in favor of the deal today substantively attacked the deal (full WaPo article at the bottom):

“While this is not the agreement I would have accepted at the negotiating table, it is better than no deal at all,” Blumenthal said. “This agreement with the duplicitous and untrustworthy Iranian regime falls short of what I had envisioned, however I have decided the alternatives are even more dangerous,” Wyden wrote. Said Peters, “Despite my serious concerns with this agreement, I have unfortunately become convinced that we are faced with no viable alternative.”

Even Senate ‘approval’ isn’t really approval any more, and the pretense of a mandate isn’t going to be saved even by a Senate filibuster. The policy debate over recess was just too brutal: public support has fallen just too much and Congressional disapproval is just too obvious.

A vote for the deal – let alone owning a filibuster for 72 hours on C-Span – may be all political cost and no policy gain for Senate Democrats.

Omri.
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