GOP Declares After Unveiling Maximum Pressure Act
The legislation, dubbed the Maximum Pressure Act, would formally codify the Trump administration’s tough sanctions campaign on Iran and force the Biden administration to submit any Iran decision to Congress for review before it is approved. The bill, spearheaded by the Republican Study Committee, was unveiled Wednesday during a morning press conference on Capitol Hill with former hardline secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who led the Trump administration’s hostile campaign against the Islamic Republic.
As the Biden administration claims to be willing to rejoin the 2015 nuclear accord, Republicans in Congress are using their legislative and oversight authority to hamper the move and make clear that any such decision will not last beyond Biden’s term in office, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
While the sanctions bill stands little chance of passing a Democrat-controlled Congress, it is yet another sign that Republicans are united in opposition to removing the inhuman anti-Iran sanctions. It is also likely that hawkish Democrats, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Menendez, will not back the Biden administration if it grants sanctions relief.
Pompeo and Rep. Jim Banks, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the Republican Study Committee’s chairman, said the legislation is a signal to the White House and Iran that Congress will not abide by any decision that is not first brought before it for a vote. The Obama administration never brought the Iran deal before Congress for a vote, fearing that it could not pass. Because the agreement was never formally ratified, the Trump administration was easily able to scrap it in 2018. Banks and several colleagues formally notified the Biden administration earlier this month that Congress will not be bound to an agreement that grants Iran sanctions relief.
"If President Biden bypasses Congress and rejoins the failed Iran deal, our adversaries should know that conservatives in Congress will continue to fight to support President Trump’s successful maximum pressure campaign and work to pass this legislation which would reimpose all sanctions until Iran” shutters its nuclear program and stops supporting resistance movements across the Middle East, Banks said in a statement.
In addition to expanding sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, the Republican Study Committee’s bill would codify into law Pompeo’s 12 demands on Iran, which included a total halt to the country’s nuclear enrichment program, the report said.
The legislation would also mandate that Congress approve any agreement developed by the Biden administration. The terms of a deal would have to be sent to the Senate to be formally ratified as a treaty. It would also limit the president’s ability to unwind sanctions unilaterally via executive order, which the Biden administration has already been contemplating.
‘No Guarantee Next Gov’t Would Stay’
A senior U.S. official said there is no guarantee that a future administration would necessarily stick to a revived Iran nuclear deal, which was abandoned in bad faith by Trump in May 2018.
"I think it’s clear there is no such thing as a guarantee,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying by the U.S. State Department during a briefing on Wednesday, when asked about Iran’s insistence on getting a written guarantee from the U.S. that a future administration will not exit the deal again.
The remarks came after the conclusion of another round of high-profile talks in Vienna, which began early this month.
The official said the Biden administration, should it reach an understanding with Iran and other parties to the JCPOA, would act in good faith, but there is "no such thing as a guarantee and I think, again, we have made that clear to Iran that it’s not something that the U.S. can or will give.”
Biden had promised to rejoin the deal and desert Trump’s maximum pressure on Iran, but his administration has so far refused to take practical steps toward the agreement.
Without a firm guarantee from the U.S. and in light of its past violations, observers say Iran has every right not to trust Washington’s intensions in the ongoing talks.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the U.S. State Department official clarified the kinds of sanctions Washington thinks it would need
to lift in order to come back into compliance with the JCPOA.
The official said some of the sanctions the Trump administration imposed on Iran are "consistent” with the JCPOA while others need to be lifted in order for the U.S. to come back into compliance.
And then a third category, the US official continued, are those that the Trump administration "deliberately” and "avowedly” imposed by invoking other labels such as support for terrorism to hinder the U.S. return to the JCPOA.
"So that has made it more difficult. We have to go through every sanction to make sure whether – to look at whether they were legitimately or not legitimately imposed,” the official added.
This is while Tehran maintains that it pursues the full removal of all the old sanctions that were promised to be lifted under the JCPOA but were reimposed by the Trump administration, the new sanctions that were imposed under Trump as well as those that his hawkish administration re-labeled and reimposed on the Islamic Republic.
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