WASHINGTON — House Republicans are threatening a lawsuit over the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.
According to Republicans, the clock for congressional review on the agreement did not start because the Obama administration never submitted side deals the administration struck with Iran during the negotiations.
“This deal is a bad deal and I pretty well understood the president of the United States made a determination that this would be an executive action he would be taking and not a treaty,” Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, chairman of the House Rules Committee, told reporters Wednesday.
“And with executive action as we know it, the president has in my opinion some wide latitude. Now as it relates to the law, that’s where the issue comes about. So it would take a judge to look at what is the executive action agreement. I have not researched this in the history of legal politics.”
Sessions added, “But where is executive action and the law? Where do they collide? So do I think that’s a wise question and a good point? Yes. It’s not a technical question. It’s probably a good point. I think what we’re doing today, I understand.”
Illinois Republican Rep. Peter Roskam spearheaded the effort to postpone the vote on the nuclear deal with Iran after he submitted a resolution Tuesday proposing to delay it until the White House submitted paperwork of the side deals it has with Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Roskam’s proposal passed nearly unanimously.
“You use every conceivable tool if you think this is a bad deal, and I do. I offered a privileged resolution to say, ‘We ought not do this.’ We should be scandalized by the approach of the administration to move forward on something as consequential as this and holding back information that they know is material,” Roskam told reporters Wednesday.
“These are two secret deals. They are secret protocols. It is clearly contemplated within the language of Corker-Cardin and it is a scandal that the administration has not disclosed this information. It was clearly contemplated when the statute was crafted,” he said.