Corked up

The Corker-Menendez “Bomb Bomb Iran Act of 2015” has apparently been watered down enough that it will not only pass the Senate with a veto-proof majority, it won’t even face a veto. The bill is likely to pass out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a wide margin sometime today, if it hasn’t already happened (UPDATE: it did pass out of committee, unanimously). The worst objections to Corker-Menendez Classic do seem to have been tamped down; the Congressional review period before any sanctions can be lifted has been shrunk from 60 to 30 days, though that can go as high as 52 days if certain conditions are met and it’s dependent on a deal being reached by July 9. Congress gets a vote on rejecting the deal, which itself would have to overcome a veto, and at least some of the Democrats who signed on to support this bill because Congressional Prerogatives are unlikely to reject a deal along the lines of the framework that was reached earlier this month.

The worry all along about Corker-Menendez is that it would cause Iran to walk away from the talks and give it reason to blame American intransigence for the talks’ failure. These terms don’t seem to rise to that level, and it also appears that any amendments that would place non-nuclear demands on the Iranian government, demands that would certainly have ended the talks, are not going to be included. One assumes that the White House by now has a pretty good sense of what kind of bill might cause the Iranians to walk, so if Obama is prepared to sign this bill as is, then it’s presumably going to be alright with them. Like Iran’s development of a civilian nuclear program, something like this was inevitable, so the goal was not to stop any Congressional action but to postpone and/or limit it so as not to really threaten the negotiations.

Of course, if the bill as written is drastically amended once it’s out of committee, or in the House, then all bets are off.