Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) has a bill in his Foreign Relations Committee that would require President Barack Obama to submit the deal he’s “negotiating” with Iran concerning the latter’s nuclear weapons program to Congress for approval or disapproval. His bill is was cosponsored by a large number of Democrats, so large that a week ago, he had 64 Senate votes for its passage.
Those Democrats are disappearing faster than fog in the West Texas sun as Obama begins turning up the heat on them. In their finest Saul Alinsky fashion, though, they’re covering their fade with a move to amend and gut the bill. As Kimberly Strassel put it in her op-ed at the link,
The goal of these amendments is to render the Corker legislation useless. Yet if Republicans balk, watch for Senate Democrats to howl that the GOP is acting in a partisan fashion, or refusing to be flexible. And watch for those same Senate Democrats to then use those complaints as their pretext for voting against the legislation.
And
[I]t appears that Mr Corker’s only path to 67—if that is even possible—is to so water-down his own bill as to make it useless. Does he want a meaningless 67-vote victory? The better route is to shoot for 60, send a principled bill to the president’s desk, and force the commander in chief and his defenders to solely face the consequences of a bad Iran deal.
Indeed. And Corker should demand a roll call vote in his committee, and Republicans should demand a roll call votes on the Senate floor, both on passage and on the veto override vote.
And that information should be bruited about in the 2016 campaign season—including in the Democrat primaries.