Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other congressional leaders on Sunday expressed doubts about the prospect of Congress signing off on a historic agreement with Iran to address that country’s nuclear programme.
On Sunday, diplomats including Secretary of State John Kerry indicated that agreement in the marathon talks to curb Iran’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief was close.
Diplomatic sources said a deal was expected to be announced on Monday. The foreign ministers of Russia and China were flying to Vienna to join Kerry and top representatives of Iran, Germany, the European Union, France and Britain.
McConnell said on Fox News Sunday the deal would be “a very hard sell” for the Obama administration in Congress. McConnell said a resolution of disapproval was likely to be introduced and predicted it would pass with more than 60 votes. If Obama vetoed the resolution, he noted, the president would need 34 votes, or more than one-third of the Senate, to sustain his veto.
Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said lawmakers would review any agreement carefully.
“At the end of the day I think people understand that if this is a bad deal that is going to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, they would own this deal if they voted for it, and so they’ll want to disapprove it,” the Tennessee Republican told NBC.
“On the other hand, if we feel like we’re better off with it, people will look to approve it.”
New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, appeared on ABC. He said the deal made him anxious because the US had gone from making sure Iran did not have nuclear capability to managing it.
“Even President Obama said in 12 or 13 years they will have a pathway to a nuclear bomb should they chose,” Menendez said, citing what he called a failure to remove Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
Menendez said Obama needed to make very clear to Iran that there was a longer-term deterrence, “because in 12 to 13 years we will be exactly back to where we are today except that Iran will have $100bn to $150bn more in its pocket and promoting terrorism throughout the Middle East.”
Menendez did not say he would oppose the deal in Congress, but said: “I’m going to judge it when we have all the elements of it.”
House Republican speaker John Boehner told CBS in a pre-recorded interview from Friday that he would applaud Obama if he withdrew from the deal, which he described as legitimising a “rogue regime”.
“From everything that’s leaked from these negotiations, the administration’s backed away from almost all of the guidelines that they set up for themselves,” Boehner said.
“And I don’t want to see a bad deal, so if in fact there’s no agreement, the sanctions are going to go back in place and at some point the Iranian regime, they’re going to have to change their behaviour. Abandon their efforts to get a nuclear weapon and stop being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world.”
The Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina also appeared on ABC. She said she would have “walked away” from negotiations and added: “We have caved on every major goal Obama set.”
Lindsey Graham, a foreign policy hawk who has advocated military action against Iran and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, said a nuclear Iran was the “worst possible nightmare for the world” and criticised the Obama administration for its weakness in negotiations.
The South Carolina senator, however, praised Kerry and said an interim deal with Iran had “worked better than I thought it would”. Speaking on CNN, he counselled leaving the interim deal in place for a new president to improve upon.
