Yesterday, New York Senator Chuck Schumer finally ended the speculation and announced that he would vote against the Iran nuclear deal. In his written statement, Schumer went out of his way to compliment President Obama for his efforts, but he rightly concluded that the U.S. would be better off without the deal than with it since it didn’t end Iran’s nuclear program, had an inadequate inspection process, wouldn’t stop it from building a bomb after it expired after a decade and the end of sanctions will aid Iran’s terror network and ballistic missile programs, aspects of the threat that the president’s deal ignores. The designated successor to Harry Reid as the Democrats’ leader in the Senate also rejected the notion that war is the only alternative to the deal. But now that he has defied the White House, the real question about Schumer is whether he will join the efforts of opponents and rally other wavering Democrats to his side or, as I previously speculated, simply sit out the battle on the sidelines or even work behind the scenes to ensure that Obama will get enough votes to sustain a veto of a resolution rejecting the deal. If so, Schumer may spare himself the opprobrium that would have rained down on him from his own pro-Israel constituency, but he will still be enabling an administration effort to isolate the Jewish state and its friends.
Whatever he may be planning to do in the coming weeks, there’s no doubt that Schumer’s decision has rattled the White House and its media cheering section. The New York Times reported his statement by declaring that it, “rattled the firewall around the accord” that the president has sought to build. Clearly, had Schumer joined other liberal Democrats in backing the deal, the game would be over. Obtaining his support would have applied the coup de grâce to any hopes that a two-thirds majority could be found to overcome a likely presidential veto of a Congressional move to spike the deal.
But even with Schumer’s announcement as well as one from Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee also saying that he would vote against it, Obama is still in a very strong position to get one-third plus one vote in the House or the Senate. Though a number of New York area Democrats, including Steve Israel, Nita Lowey, Grace Meng and Kathleen Rice have joined with what may be a unanimous Republican vote against the deal, Obama may be succeeding in retaining the backing of enough members of his party to ensure the pact survives.
The point of Obama’s heavy-handed attacks on domestic critics as well as the Israeli government on this issue isn’t just to ensure that he scares enough Democrats into backing him. The rationale of the Iran deal isn’t to be found in the arcane arguments about how many centrifuges Tehran is being allowed to keep, an inspection process that gives it 24 days warning of visits or even the shocking fact that it may not be forced to divulge the extent of its military research. As the statements from the president and the secretary of state have made clear, the real justification for it is an effort to craft a new détente with the Islamist regime. The administration truly thinks the “Death to America” chants being led by Iran’s Supreme Leader are unimportant and that Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other Iranian officials don’t mean it when they repeatedly say they intended to eliminate Israel. Obama’s legacy isn’t just a nuclear pact, but a new Iran-centric foreign policy that will downgrade America’s existing alliances with Israel and the Arab states that are just as upset about the deal as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But in order to ensure that this new Middle East policy succeeds, Obama needs more than to let his deal sneak through Congress via a reverse ratification process rather than as a treaty that would, as the Constitution requires, a two thirds positive vote in the Senate. He also needs to divide and ultimately undermine the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that has helped build the alliance between the U.S. and the Jewish state. It’s not just the “no” votes on Iran that he wants to hamstring. The president also wants to kneecap AIPAC and isolate it and other Israel backers by branding them as warmongers who are not loyal to the U.S.
That is why Schumer and others who also see themselves as guardians of the alliance can’t merely vote no and then shrug their shoulders while other Democrats allow this disgraceful act of appeasement to survive Congressional scrutiny. The fact that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a close Schumer ally, has now said she will vote for the deal is an ominous sign that New York’s senior senator is sitting this fight out.
Schumer may be right to worry that efforts to persuade other senators to join him will undermine his claim to be Reid’s successor. But if he really wishes to make good on his boasts that he is the shomer — in Hebrew, the guardian — of the alliance with Israel, he must do more than vote against the deal. The stakes for America’s security and for the pro-Israel community are greater than his ambitions. Though the Schumer Iran deal statement is a powerful one, his silence in the Senate cloakroom as the votes are being counted will speak even louder as to his real intentions.
