Ensuring Tax Exempt Organizations the Right to Appeal Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. COATS. I thank the minority leader for this opportunity.

IRAN NUCLEAR AGREEMENT REVIEW ACT

Mr. President, recently on this floor, I spoke about the need to pass the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act with robust, veto-proof, bipartisan majorities. That is asking a lot, but I did so because this is the only chance we have to prevent President Obama from having a free and totally independent hand to conclude a flawed agreement with the Government of Iran. We cannot allow that to happen.

This Congress has pleaded for and worked for and will achieve the opportunity to play a major role in this decision, which is a decision of historic consequence.

Let me repeat what I just said. This bill is the only chance we have now to prevent President Obama from having a completely free hand, with no opportunity to address it in a bipartisan way, to achieve success in rejecting a bad agreement.

Passage of the bill before us will result in either forcing critical and absolutely necessary improvements in the deal now being cooked with our Secretary of State and the President and his people or defeating a bad deal if a bad deal is presented to us.

The stakes in this game are beyond calculation. I personally regard this as the most consequential issue of my entire public career. Our failure to have an opportunity to have this Congress--the representatives of the American people--bring before the American people what is in this deal and the consequences if this deal is not a good deal that will prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons capability--this is absolutely essential. The only chance we have to exercise our constitutional right, which I believe, but our right to address something of this consequence is to pass the Corker-Cardin bill.

It is not the perfect bill. It is not the bill that I think perhaps even Senator Corker would have preferred. But it is where we are. The only way we could get here and get bipartisan support for this was to do this.

This gives us the opportunity to do the following: A Congressional review period will be provided before implementation. An opportunity for Congress to vote on the agreement will be provided under Corker-Cardin.

A limitation on the President's use of waivers to suspend sanctions that have been put in place by this body will be taken away. A requirement that Congress receive the final deal will be lost. The requirement that the President certify that Iran is complying will be taken away. A mechanism for Congress to rapidly reimpose sanctions in the event of violations will be lost. Reporting on Iran support for terrorism, ballistic missile development, and human rights violations will be lost. All of this is lost if we do not stand together and insist on the right to engage in this. We must pass this or the defeat will be of historical consequence.

This bill is the only chance, as I said, that Congress has to weigh in on a potential agreement. The stakes are too high. The consequence is too great to engage in changes. Many well-intended statements have been made by my colleagues, and I endorse every word of what has been said. Amendments have been offered that, had they not been offered by someone else, in a different fashion, I would have wanted to offer. We can still offer those going forward.

But in order to achieve the bipartisan support necessary to deny the President the opportunity to have a free hand in cutting any deal he wants and the concessions already given--this should raise alarms in each of us in terms of support for this bill which is before us.

What are the stakes? What are the consequences? Former Secretaries Kissinger and Shultz and other foreign policy experts did a recent Wall Street Journal piece and said this:

If the Middle East is ``proliferated'' and becomes host to a plethora of nuclear-threshold states, several in mortal rivalry with each other, on what concept of nuclear deterrence or strategic stability will international security be based?

They continue:

It is in America's strategic interest to prevent the outbreak of a nuclear war and its catastrophic consequences. Nuclear arms must not be permitted to turn into conventional weapons. The passions of the region allied with weapons of mass destruction may impel deepening American involvement.

In closing, I want to address statements offered by some who argue that passing this bill is unnecessary because in 2017 we will have a new President in the White House and that President will be a Republican. Well, I hope that is so, but there is obviously no guarantee of that. But in the meantime--in the meantime--Iran will achieve a free hand to go forward with newly acquired wealth, the will to achieve and the technical capability to achieve nuclear weapons capability.

Let me conclude by supporting a statement that was made by Max Boot, a respected foreign policy analyst:

Skeptics about the looming nuclear accord with Iran may be taking comfort from the promises of Republican presidential candidates to tear up the treaty as soon as they reach the Oval Office. They shouldn't be. Even assuming a Republican wins the White House next year--

Which, as we know, is not a certainty. Hopefully, from our standpoint, we hope that is the case-- pulling out of the agreement won't necessarily fix its defects. In fact, it could make the situation even worse.

The U.S. would then get the worst of both worlds: Iran already would have been enriched by hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief--and it would be well on its way to fielding nuclear weapons with de facto permission from the international community. To avoid this nightmare scenario, the best play from America's standpoint could well be to keep the accord in place to at least delay Iran's decision to weaponize.

In short, don't expect salvation in 2017. If the accord is signed its consequences will be irrevocable. Whatever a future president does or does not do, Iran's hard-line regime will be immeasurably strengthened by the agreement. That makes it all the more imperative to stop a bad agreement now--not two years from now.

I urge my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, to vote to give Congress--this Congress--the right and the opportunity to scrutinize every single word of what is being negotiated with the Iranians, to inform the American people, and then achieve what I would hope would be an overwhelming rejection of the agreement if it does not achieve the goal of denying Iran its nuclear weapons capability. This is a very important vote before us. I think we need to look at what the end goal is and how we can best get there under the circumstances which we now are in. We would all like to be in a different position. But to achieve and get to this particular point, we are looking at this particular bill to give us a say--a meaningful say--and an opportunity to reject a bad agreement which at this particular point in time, in my view, does not achieve what we need to achieve and should be thoroughly scrutinized by us and the American people.

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