More garrulous members of the House Foreign Affairs committee got ahead of Republican leaders on Tuesday morning by hitting out at specific aspects of the Iran nuclear deal that had been announced just hours earlier.
Right-wing representatives on the panel launched into angry diatribes against the multilateral agreement, with special ire reserved for its verification provisions. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), meawhile, at a press conference held just before the hearing, declined to get into details about his opposition to the historic accord.
“Based on what I know now, it doesn’t look like a very good deal,” he told reporters. “I am gonna review all the facts, but based on what I know, I am highly skeptical at best.”
He did not say how Republican leaders intend to proceed, “but we do intend to act.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Ed Royce (R-Calif.), however, wasted no time calling oversight of Iran’s nuclear program lax.
“We wanted to get this within 24 hours,” he said of compulsory inspections. “This agreement, if we’re lucky, will get inspectors access in 24 days after all the steps that Iran has insisted on.”
Royce also denounced the multilateral basis of the inspections regime, and questioned other UN Security Council members’ commitment to it. Verification, he said, “is only predicated on the idea that we have cooperation from Russia and China.”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), a former chair of the committee, repeated Royce’s complaints, and said that the International Atomic Energy Agency will be able to visit “suspect locations…only after P5+1 consultation with the Iranians.”
Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), in an angry meandering monologue against the deal, blasted “managed access,” calling it “one of many Achilles heels.”
“How is that defined?” he asked. “How does that apply to suspected military sites?”
Democrats did not unanimously welcome the deal, either, as expected. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) predicted that economic growth Iran will experience due to sanctions relief would bring trouble to the region.
“They’re gonna kill a lot of Sunnis. Some of whom deserve it, many who do not,” he said. “And they’ll have billions left over to kill Americans and Israelis, and work other mischief.”
Lingering in the room, although it mostly went unmentioned, was the credibility of the conservative war caucus in Congress in the wake of last decade’s invasion of Iraq and America’s own “other mischief” that followed.
It was alluded to by Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) when he questioned a witness who, for many, personified Congressional incompetence and malice in the build-up to the Iraq War—former Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)
“I agree with Sen. Lieberman. This is a very important vote,” Meeks said. “And I can’t leave it in a vacuum because I had another important vote. And that was back when we were talking about Iraq.”
President Obama said early Tuesday morning that he will veto any Congressional resolution of disapproval rejecting the deal—a move that has left opponents requiring a two-thirds majority.
Among the most frequently made argument by proponents of the agreement during the far right-leaning House committee hearing on Tuesday: the global sanctions regime and the multilateral front against Iran would rapidly deteriorate if the US walked away from talks.
Among those boosters was one witness called to testify: former Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns. A former official who served under both Republican and Democratic presidencies, Burns said his background conducting multilateral talks with Iran during the presidency of George W. Bush informed his appraisal of President Obama’s deal.
Had the White House called home negotiators as conservatives wanted, Burns claimed, “our coalition, which is global, which contains every major country in the world, I think would have frayed.”
