Tom McClintock: HR 1191

From Congressman Tom McClintock:

Dear Friend,

The House just passed HR 1191 that purports to restore Congressional oversight over the President’s negotiations with Iran’s fascist-Islamic leaders.  I believe it completely missed the point.

Any agreement with Iran’s leaders is meaningless, because their word is meaningless.  Iran’s government is a notoriously untrustworthy rogue state that has made it unmistakably clear that it intends to acquire nuclear weapons and once acquired, to use them.  The only way to avert this nightmare — short of war — is for the regime to collapse from within.

Our Constitution requires that any treaty be approved by 2/3 of the Senate.  This wasn’t going to happen, so Mr. Obama simply redefined the prospective treaty as an agreement between leaders – an agreement with no force of law and no legal standing.

I fear that Congress has just changed this equation by establishing a wholly extra-constitutional process that lends the imprimatur of Congress to these ill-advised negotiations with no practical way to stop the lifting of sanctions.  Instead of 2/3 of the Senate having to approve a treaty as the Constitution requires, this agreement takes effect automatically unless 2/3 of both houses reject it – a complete sham.

I fear that this bill gives tacit approval to extremely harmful negotiations that Congress instead ought to vigorously condemn and unambiguously repudiate.

We can only pray that in the days ahead, what Churchill called “the Parliamentary democracies” will regain the national leadership required to prevent a repetition of the Munich Accords in the Middle East.

That will require treating the Iranian dictatorship as the international pariah that it is.  And it will require providing every ounce of moral and material support that the Iranian opposition needs to rid their nation of this fascist-Islamic dictatorship, to restore their proud heritage and to retake their place among the civilized nations of the world.

Sincerely,

Tom McClintock