Good job, Mr. President, Sen. Mikulski, congressional Democrats, and GOP leadership.
Senator Barbara Mikulski has announced that she will vote in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal. Sen. Mikulski’s support is critical because she becomes the 34th Democrat to announce that she will vote yea. Under the Corker framework so ingeniously conceived by Republican leadership in Congress, this means Obama’s deal cannot be defeated – under the legislation Congress is deemed to endorse the agreement unless it can muster a now unattainable 67 Senate votes (and a similar two-thirds of the House) to enact a resolution of disapproval over Obama’s veto.
It is worth repeating that Republicans rationalized this abdication of their duty to use their constitutional powers to block Obama’s empowerment of America’s sworn enemies by claiming that the legislation ensured that Congress would get to review the deal. This, of course, was always preposterous:
(a) Congress has many tools – the power of the purse, the ability to block Obama appointments and legislative priorities, the power to conduct oversight hearings, the capacity to raise public alarm in media coverage – that could have pressured Obama to reveal the deal’s terms;