Congress Can Still Mess Up the Iran Deal

Senator Bob Corker  {Jonathan Ernst/Reuters }

MICHAEL TOMASKY, DAILY BEAST

“Now, Congress takes up the matter” are words that are ensured to send shudders down the spine, so shudder away: We’ve just entered the congressional phase of the Iran talks, with a Senate hearing next Tuesday, after which it’s up to Mitch McConnell to decide how fast and aggressively to move with the bill from Tennessee Republican Bob Corker that would bar the administration from making any changes to U.S. sanctions against Iran for 60 days while Congress reviews and debates any Iran agreement.

There are, as the Dude said, man, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous here. It’s all quite complicated. But here, it seems to me, is your cut-to-the-chase question: Is there enough good faith in this United States Senate for something to be worked out? Or is it just impossible?

One proceeds from the assumption that the Senate will do whatever it can to kill a deal. It’s a Republican Senate, by a pretty wide margin (54-46); history would suggest that these Republicans simply aren’t going to hand President Obama a win like this. It hardly matters what the details are, about what Iran can or can’t do at Fordow, about the “snapback” provisions of the sanctions, about the inspections regime, or about what precise oversight role Congress has. It’s just basically impossible to imagine that this Republican Party, after everything we’ve seen over these last six years, and this Republican Senate majority leader, who once said it was his job to make Obama a one-term president, won’t throw up every roadblock to a deal they can conjure.



Once again, we’re left separating out the factors the way scientists reduce compounds to their constituent elements in the lab. How much of this is just Obama hatred? How much is (this is a slightly different thing) the conviction—quite insane, but firmly held—that he doesn’t have the best interests of the United States at heart? How much is a genuinely paranoid, McCarthy-ish world view about the intractably evil nature of our enemy and the definitional Chamberlainism of ever thinking otherwise?

And how much is just self-interested politics, as it is bequeathed to us in its current form? Which is to say—if you are a Republican senator, you simply cannot cast a vote that can be seen as “pro-Obama” under any circumstances. You just can’t do it.

I asked in a column last week whether there would be one Republican officeholder in Washington who might say, “Hey, upon examination of the details, this looks like a decent deal with risks that are acceptable, and I’m going to support it?” It’s still a good question.

Some suggest Corker himself. Corker has this reputation, in part earned, as one of the reasonable ones. He gets articles written about him like this one,  from The New York Times a couple of days ago, which limned him as a Republican of the old school, a sensible fellow who still wants to horse-trade.

And he is—but only up to a point, at which the horses return to their stalls. The most notable example here is the Dodd-Frank bill. This is all detailed at great and exacting length by Robert Kaiser in his excellent book about how financial reform became law, Act of Congress. Then, Corker talked for hours and hours with Chris Dodd about the particulars—derivatives reform, oversight of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, more. He wanted to play ball, even thought he might deliver some votes. But as time passed, it became clear to Corker that the base just wasn’t standing for it. He faced reelection in 2012. Not tough reelection—he won with 64 percent of the vote. But reelection campaigns are great excuses for senators to do nothing, and nothing is what Corker did. He withdrew from all participation with Dodd and Frank, and he ultimately voted against the bill.  When it mattered, he caved to the extremists, in other words, among his colleagues and in his base. Why that means he should be getting credit for a spirit of compromise now in New York Times articles is something that, to my obtuse mind, requires further explanation.

Senator Tim Kaine

Happily, though, all is not lost. It’s far from clear that [Rebooblicans] can block a deal. There are, I’m told, three categories of senators on this question. The first is our own mullahs—no deal no how. The second is a group of mostly Democrats and independents—Virginia’s Tim Kaine, who is a close ally of the White House, and Maine’s Angus King—who basically want a deal but want to be sure that it’s good, and want to influence the shape of any legislation the Senate might pass.

The third group is senators who also basically would like to see a deal but want the Senate to serve as a backstop against a deal they see as bad. I’d put Chuck Schumer in that third camp. So when these people say they back the Corker bill, as Schumer did this week, it doesn’t mean they’re against the administration or a deal per se. Democrats aren’t going to be Obama’s problem here. A few, the ones from the deep red states, may be boxed in. But most will stick with the administration, if a deal is finalized along current terms.




I don’t think our mullahs have the numbers right now. [They need a 2/3 majority to override a presidential veto. But Obama is going to have to sell this to more parties than [being interviewed by Tom Friedman and Steve Inskeep of NPR]. He has, or should have, Friedman’s readers and Inskeep’s listeners already. The way to get someone like Corker to play ball is to sell it in Knoxville. Public opinion still influences foreign policy, as Obama knows from his Syrian experiences. Put it to work.

DEMOCRATS NEED TO COME TOGETHER

Michael Tomasky, Daily Beast

So this is something that starts happening in an incumbent president’s sixth year, especially after an electoral walloping like the one the Democrats just absorbed: The fissures start to show. Because the president is becoming a lame duck and minds are turning naturally toward the next presidential election, the moment is now for the heavyweights in the party to start defining it in post-Obama terms. And the big fight the Democrats are starting to have, and need to have, is about how to put themselves squarely on the side of the broad middle class.

Of course, to someone who sees the world the way I do, it’s comically pathetic that there’s even a competition here. The Republicans are the party of the 1 percent. Oh, maybe the 5 percent on a good day. But really the 1 percent. No—actually really, the .01 percent. That more people can’t see this is, ah, well, a whole ’nother column really.

But in fact I think most people do see it—they just don’t mind it that much anymore. This is because 1) after 30 years of trickle-down agitprop, they’ve come to accept that what’s good for their bosses is good for them (because most people don’t know, for example, that U.S. wages haven’t really grown in those 30 years while for their bosses it’s been a party practically without rival in recent human history), and 2) most folks would simply rather blame poor people for their problems because doing so requires a lot less connecting of dots and is thus a more comforting narrative for them.

This is the crucial point that Democrats often don’t get. Democrats and liberals are inclined to say to themselves things like “if only most Americans knew X”—X being, say, that George Bush’s or Mitt Romney’s tax plan overwhelmingly benefits the rich—“why, we’d have ’em on our side.” But most Americans do know that, in their bones anyway. And they mind it, a little, but they don’t mind it as much as some of what they see from the Democrats.

Here, my conservative Beast colleague Lloyd Green is not entirely wrong to argue as he did Monday that a lot of middle-class people look at the two major domestic-policy matters the Democrats have placed before them—the Affordable Care Act and Obama’s executive order on immigration—and see a party that is more interested in helping poor people, and even illegally arrived poor people, than it is in serving them.

The Affordable Care Act was always a short-term political loser with respect to middle-class voters. Most of them have insurance, and only a small percentage face catastrophic illness. And you can explain why the individual mandate is a necessary leg of the three-legged stool until you’re purple in the face and it won’t get through to most voters. If it survives, it may start paying political dividends in a decade or so, when people have gotten used to it and it has increased the amount and type of preventive care insurance companies offer and made us a healthier society. It was the right thing to do for these and other reasons, but I don’t think anyone, including Obama himself, thought it would be a big political winner in his era.

Ditto the immigration executive order. True, a solid majority backs the Democratic position on the substance. But the recent batch of polls shows Americans to be, what else, deeply split on whether Obama was right to do this by fiat. (I’d love to know the percentage of Americans who are actually aware that the House could have spared us all this by passing the bill the Senate passed, which the country supports roughly two-to-one, at any point in the past 18 months; it’s surely single digits.) So Obama is not getting pummeled on this one so far, but he’s not winning it either. Again, the right thing to do, by my lights, but something that will be seen by the broader middle class as not really benefiting them.

In the coming months and up into 2016, Republicans will make sure these two programs stay front and center, because they of course know all this, and they’ll want to paint the Democrats as only looking out for “those people.” So the Democrats, as Chuck Schumer put it in his big speech last week, have to show the middle class that the party is firmly on its side.



The problem is that the Democrats are more divided on the “how” of doing this than they are on any other single question. At least that’s what we’re told. But are they, really? So much is made of the Elizabeth Warren Wing vs. the centrists (they don’t have a figurehead who can equal Warren in stature). And sure, there are differences. Trade is probably the biggest one, and the issue puts Democratic interest groups at each other’s throats, although regular voters don’t care much about trade policy. Whether to attack the deficit is another, but the deficit is going down, and by the way most voters don’t care much about it either. Whether to give a little ground on entitlement reform is a third, and that admittedly is a big one that there is no way to finesse (except to raise the payroll tax cap, which is the most sensible approach and one the Democrats will come around to someday).

But on loads of economic issues, as Schumer suggested in his speech, virtually all Democrats agree—minimum wage, student loans, workplace rules, infrastructure, a tighter link between productivity and wages are just a few of the things that all Democrats agree on and that, with the partial exception of the minimum wage, would benefit huge majorities of voters.

I said “partial” because a higher minimum wage, often thought of as helpful only to those at the very bottom, would have ripple effects for workers higher up the wage chain. In fact, this is a terrific case in point for the way in which the war between the Democrats’ two economic wings can be greatly exaggerated. I have before me on my browser two recent studies on this question, one by the centrist Hamilton Project and the other by the more liberal Economic Policy Institute. Both give estimates of how many U.S. workers would benefit from an increase in the minimum wage.
Only about 3.3 million Americans (pdf)  earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less. The Hamilton paper estimates that an increase would benefit as many as 35 million workers, while EPI puts that number at more like 28 million.

Here’s what I’d like to see. Now that Warren and centrist Mark Warner are both in the Democrats’ Senate leadership ranks, I think the two of them should sit down and hammer out a Warren-Warner Middle-Class Compact that consists of 10 or however many major points that they know they can get everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin to agree on (and of course they also need to be confident that Hillary Clinton will agree to most of them). Warren makes one clearly recognizable gesture to the center, and the centrists make one recognizable gesture to the left. But they agree. They have the stature and the position and the power to do so. I don’t know if they’re friends, but they don’t seem to be enemies; Warren helped raise money for Warner this year.



The core problem in Washington is that many both in the center and on the left are just too emotionally committed to a narrative by which the other side’s prescriptions will bring about the certain apocalyptic destruction of the Democratic Party. Warren and Warner have the power to change that narrative. Their chance to do so starts now