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Senate Republicans Plan Vote on Iran Nuclear Deal Senate Democrats Clear Way for Iran Nuclear Deal
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — Senate leaders have set a showdown vote for Thursday around 3:45 p.m. that could definitively end Republican efforts to derail President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, with the fate of the bill hanging by a handful of Democratic votes. WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats delivered a major victory to President Obama on Thursday when they blocked a Republican resolution to reject a six-nation nuclear accord with Iran, ensuring that the landmark deal will take effect without a veto showdown between Congress and the White House.
With a largely partisan divide over the accord — which is uniformly opposed by Republicans and also by a handful of Democrats — it was unclear whether the measure allowing the Senate to move forward on formally disapproving it had the required 60 votes. A procedural vote fell short of the number needed to break a Democratic filibuster. It culminated hours of debate on the Senate floor and capped months of discord since the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China announced the agreement with Iran in July.
“Let’s be clear about who is moving to end debate,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the minority leader, on the Senate floor Thursday morning. “The Republican leader.” Debate over the accord divided Democrats between their loyalties to the president and their constituents, especially Jewish ones, animated the antiwar movement on the left and exposed the waning power of the Israeli lobbying force that spent millions to prevent the accord.
Forty-two Democrats have come out in favor of the agreement, but a few of them could peel away and vote Thursday afternoon to end debate on the Republican resolution of disapproval, arguing that the measure deserves a final up-or-down vote. The president can afford only one defection from the ranks of his supporters to ensure the bill is filibustered. “Regardless of how one feels about the agreement,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, one of four Democrats to vote against the president, “fair-minded Americans should acknowledge the president’s strong achievements in combating and containing Iran.”
If two Democratic supporters of the deal join the four declared Democrats who oppose it, the resolution would almost certainly pass the Senate. The House would then have to decide whether to take it up and force a presidential veto. Mr. Obama appears to have an ample cushion in the Senate to sustain his veto. Acknowledging the tortured decision he and other skeptical Democrats traveled, Mr. Schumer said, “I also have a great deal of respect for the careful thought and deliberation my colleagues went through,” adding, “I recognize for them, that this is a vote of conscience just as it is for me.”
On Wednesday, House Republicans threw another wrench into the vote by claiming that the White House had not disclosed secret side agreements on the deal, and by arguing that Congress did not actually have its agreed-upon review period. . They also declined to vote on a message to disapprove in that chamber, even though it would have easily passed. Yet President Obama’s triumph in securing the international agreement — without the support of a single member of the party now in control of Congress — is refashioning the definition of victory for a waning presidency in an era of divided government.
House leaders decided that they would instead hold a vote to approve the Iran agreement to try and force Democrats to assert their support for the accord, which has divided many lawmakers who represent districts with sizable Jewish populations from their colleagues who support Mr. Obama. While bipartisan victories tend to be those most celebrated outside Washington, in the current political climate, success by the president is now often measured more by the scope of the policy achieved than by any claim of sweeping consensus. And losing has its own evolving meaning. Republicans will use Mr. Obama’s triumphs — as they did with the health care law — as a means to attack Democrats in anticipation of next year’s election.
With a procedural measure failing in the Senate, Mr. Obama will be free to move forward with the agreement, although Congressional Republicans will probably seek new paths to undermine it. Mr. Obama may go down in history as a president whose single biggest foreign policy and domestic achievements were won with no Republican votes, a stark departure from his 2008 campaign that was fueled by the promise of uniting. As with the Iran accord, the health care law — passed exclusively with Democratic votes — was a policy achievement that has come to define his presidency, in part through the vehemence of its opponents in Congress.
“President Obama can claim that he found a way to move an extremely important, yet controversial, diplomatic agreement through the political process,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University. “For conservatives the deal fulfills every negative view that they have about how President Obama and the way Democrats handle foreign threats,” he added. “The narrative is built for the campaign trail — a Democratic president agrees to drop sanctions on a horrible regime that even most Democrats agree shows little signs of reform.”
With an ample majority of Republicans running the House but a narrow one in the Senate, Mr. Obama has learned to measure when and how he can hold congressional Democrats together when he needs them — as is the case with the use of the filibuster for the Iran disapproval measure — but also when he needs to turn to Republicans to help flatten his own party, as was the case with a major trade package over the summer.
But the sheer partisan nature of the Iran matter does not bode well for impending fights on Capitol Hill, including one over whether to raise the debt ceiling and how to deal with spending.