White House Lobbying Democrats and Independents to Support Iran Nuclear Deal
WASHINGTON — Senator Angus King, the prudent independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, flipped through his copy of thenuclear agreement with Iran on Wednesday, pointing to scores of notes in the page margins. “The first step for me is to read the agreement word for word,” Mr. King said, noting that he also would seek to consult with a former weapons inspector and a nuclear physicist or two.
Seeking clarity on the written deal is one of several steps Mr. King says he will take as he winds his way to what he says will be one of the most complicated and consequential decisions of his tenure — whether to support the accord struck with major world powers and Iran.
“This is a solemn responsibility,” Mr. King said, brandishing his copy on the Senate floor, adding, “This is too important to just become a political issue.”
White House officials, facing nearly intractable opposition from Republicans, are pinning their hopes — and focusing their lobbying — on nervous congressional Democrats and independents like Mr. King — to preserve President Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement.
Congress has 60 days to review the deal, after which it can pass a resolution of approval or disapproval — or do nothing. Mr. Obama would veto a resolution of disapproval, and the opponents could override that only with a two-thirds vote of Congress. But the White House’s goal, according to Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, is not just to muster the votes to sustain a veto. It is to win over 41 senators to block passage of a resolution of disapproval.
“It’s going to take some time to get there,” Mr. Kaine said. But “if we really look at it thoroughly, the chances that there would not be a resolution of disapproval passing the Senate are good.”
To do that, convincing skittish fellow Democrats is crucial; on a veto override, the administration cannot lose more than 12 of 46 Democrats and independents on the deal. On a filibuster to block a resolution of disapproval, the administration can lose only five.
“My hope is that everyone in Congress also evaluates this agreement based on the facts,” Mr. Obama said Thursday in a news conference at the White House, “not on politics. Not on posturing. Not on the fact that this is a deal that I bring to Congress, as opposed to a Republican president. Not based on lobbying.”
But the White House was doing its own lobbying on Wednesday, led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was dispatched to meet with House Democrats, some of whom have already formed a coalition devoted to preventing a veto override in that chamber, where a motion to disapprove seems nearly preordained. “He was very respectful,” said Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont and a member of that coalition. “There were no exhortations for people to hop on board. There was real encouragement for everyone to kick the tires.”
For the president, the House may be the harder chamber to defend, said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the most senior Jewish Democrat in leadership. With Republicans voting against the deal en masse, the president would need 145 of the 188 House Democrats to stand with him to sustain a veto, a vote complicated by the fact that all members are up for re-election. For most senators, the issue will have long receded when their campaigns come up.
Unlike some Democratic senators, Mr. Israel was not terribly worried what a Democratic vote against the deal would mean to Mr. Obama’s legacy.
“The average person isn’t waking up in the morning thinking about the impact of a few Democrats voting against him,” he said. “If I felt this was a bad deal, then I would vote to override a veto.”
Senate Democrats were summoned to the White House for a briefing with Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.
Mr. Kaine, an influential member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went through the Iran nuclear agreement line by line with Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, then assigned his staff to produce an annotated version of the deal, singling out where it diverges from the April 2 nuclear framework.
His biggest concern is the inspection regime, which falls short of “anytime, anywhere,” once promised by administration negotiators. But that is not a deal breaker, he added.
“I can understand why somebody would say, with respect to their own sensitive military bases, ‘Hey, wait, you can’t come in like this,’ ” he said, snapping his fingers. “But there’s some reasonable period of time which would give us a guarantee that they’re not cheating. Exactly what that is, those are the kinds of questions I will be asking.”
While many senators in both parties have said they will carefully study the agreement and attend hearings — which are expected to begin in the Senate next week — it would appear that only a handful of senators, almost exclusively Democrats, are truly undecided. Scores of Republicans denounced the agreement before its text was fully available; the classified components can be viewed by senators only later this week.
Perhaps no senator will command more attention than Chuck Schumer of New York, likely to be the next Democratic leader in the Senate and a lawmaker attuned to the concerns of Jewish voters in his state. Mr. Schumer, usually one of the most outspoken members of Congress, has been uncharacteristically reticent to talk about the deal.
“I will sit down and read the agreement thoroughly and meet with officials, administration officials, all over, on all different sides,” Mr. Schumer said. “This isn’t a decision that should be made lightly.”
Mr. King’s consulting team, he said, will include Graham T. Allison Jr., an arms control expert at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and David A. Kay, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations.
Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said he would take a similar approach. He has already spoken to Mr. Biden at length and asked numerous technical questions. He intends to read the entire agreement this weekend and cancel appointments next week to make time to review the classified annexes. Just as important as the documents themselves, he said, will be staff analysis and input from supporters and critics among regional allies.
Mr. Coons, a trained chemist, said his biggest concern was Iran’s ability to continue researching advanced centrifuges, which could be used to quickly enrich uranium into nuclear weapons material. To that end, he demanded and received a briefing from Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, a Nobel laureate. “This is not selling, this is informing,” Mr. Coons said.
