Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SULLIVAN. Mr. President, I rise to add my voice for the bipartisan disapproval of the President's nuclear agreement with Iran that we have been debating all week and that we will continue to debate. I do so in the spirit that resulted in 83 U.S. Senators from both sides of the aisle writing a letter just last year to the President of the United States. This letter hasn't gotten a lot of attention in this debate, and I certainly think it should.

In that spirit, the Senate, in an incredibly bipartisan way--by the way, several of those Senators are still here. There were 41 Democrats, 41 Republicans, and 1 Independent who signed this letter to the President of the United States saying: These are the strategic goals we want in this agreement, these are the goals we should have for the security of the United States, and these are the goals we think will protect America and our allies. None of these have been met in the nuclear agreement we have been debating. This letter says that Iran must dismantle its nuclear weapons program and it must be prevented from ever having a path to a nuclear bomb. It also states that Iran should have no inherent right to enrichment.

I commend my colleagues to reread this letter. The President's nuclear deal clearly does not meet the goals that are laid out in the letter. Nonetheless, it has become clear that a number of Senators on the other side of the aisle are going to vote to support the President's agreement despite having signed that letter. That is going to be a personal decision for them, but if you are a signatory, you ought to take another look at the letter you signed to the President and the American people in 2014.

I will lay out a few of my concerns about the deal. I think many of my colleagues have done a fantastic job this week. I don't want to name names, but there are so many on both sides of the aisle--again, bipartisan--who have raised their concerns about the President's Iranian nuclear deal.

One of the biggest frustrations I think so many of us have seen as we have done our sacred duty in this body--to read the agreement, to understand the details, to go to all of the hearings and briefings, to reach out to experts in the field--as we have raised questions about this agreement, what we don't get is straight talk. What we have been getting, unfortunately, is spin.

I think Senator Coats did a great job yesterday of explaining how this agreement is filled with ambiguities, with language that allows it to mean so many different things to so many different people, including Iranians. Let me provide a few examples that many of us have raised and that I have spoken on the floor about in the past, but I think they are important enough and they bear repeating.

First, Secretary Kerry came and said to us: There is no grandfather clause in this agreement. So we see Europeans rushing now to invest in Iran. The Secretary said there is no grandfather clause. Here is what paragraph 37 of the agreement says:

In such an event that sanctions are reimposed, the provisions in this paragraph would not apply with retroactive effect to contracts signed between any party in Iran or Iranian individuals and entities prior to the date of application.

That sure sounds like a grandfather clause to me, but we are told it is not.

Second, there has been much talk about this snapback provision, but there is no provision in this agreement that says ``snap back.'' We talked about how we are going to immediately increase sanctions overnight.

I had the opportunity to be a part of the Bush administration's team that was economically isolating Iran. We went around the world to our allies--we had to threaten, in many cases, our European and other allies to divest out of Iran. That is how we got the economic isolation of Iran. It took years to do this. It took years. Yet, this administration is saying: Overnight, despite the fact that European companies are already in Tehran investing, we are going to snapback sanctions overnight. It is not a snap. Divestiture out of Iran is a slog, and it will take years, again. The snapback is a fallacy.

Finally, Senator Ayotte and others have done a great job of raising questions about a basic scenario that is laid out--very important--with regard to other paragraphs in this agreement. In an important hypothetical, which is actually very likely, we have asked Secretary Kerry and Secretary Lew--a number of us: Let's assume sanctions are lifted. In six to nine months, the economy starts humming, the Annex II sanctions are lifted, is Iran still a sponsor of terrorism--the world's largest sponsor of terrorism--and they commit an act of terror. This body goes to reimpose sanctions; whoever the next President is agrees because of some heinous act of terrorism. What Iran can do is cite either paragraph 26 or paragraph 37 that states: ``If sanctions are reinstated, in whole or in part, Iran will treat that as grounds to cease performing its commitments'' under the entire agreement.

So what happens? We resanction Iran for a terrorist action that they are likely to take. They say: Hey, we can legally walk. Read paragraph 26. Read paragraph 37. Read our letter to the U.N. Security Council. It is all laid out there. They walk, legally; the sanctions are lifted, they are still the No. 1 sponsor of terrorism in the world, their economy is humming, and they are on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon.

We have asked that question to the administration leaders who negotiated this deal time and time again, and they have never given us an answer as to why that is not a correct reading of this agreement--because it is.

These are just a few examples. Many of my colleagues have done an outstanding job of looking at different parts of this agreement and expressing our concerns, but just as important is what our constituents think. What do Alaskans think? What do the American people think? Like all of my colleagues, I spent my recess back home in Alaska, and I spoke to hundreds of my fellow Alaskans at townhall meetings, roundtable discussions, our State fair.

Remarkably, I did not have one Alaskan come up to me saying: I really think you should support that Iranian nuclear deal of the President's. Every single interaction I had was in opposition to this agreement, and it was visceral, particularly among Alaska veterans. We are a proud State. We have the largest number of veterans per capita of any State in the Union. But whether they were recent vets from Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam vets, they literally would look at me and say: What on Earth are we doing? Help me understand that, Senator Sullivan. What are we doing? Visceral.

During this debate this week, even some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--they are not big supporters--are using terms such as ``seriously flawed,'' ``deeply flawed,'' ``serious concerns,'' ``falls short in many areas.'' Across the country, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to this deal by a margin of 2 to 1. And the more the public knows about the deal, the more they dislike it. These poll numbers in terms of support are dropping. Right now, the latest poll, 21 percent of Americans--that is it--support this deal.

The people are wise. They elected us to listen, and we should do so. They might not know all the details as some of us do, but they know--they know--I saw it from my constituents--that something is fundamentally wrong with this agreement.

So we have to ask ourselves why. Why? Why are Americans--the more the President and John Kerry talk about this agreement, the more Americans become opposed to it. And why are even the supporters, as we saw this week, so tepid in their support?

Now, all negotiations require compromise. All negotiations require concessions. We all know this. We have negotiated. In fact, many of my colleagues, particularly on the other side, emphasize this. Concessions are part of what we do. They are part of an agreement, but at a certain point, concessions become humiliations. If they are too significant and too frequent, concessions are humiliations. No one likes to be humiliated, but especially proud citizens of a great Nation like the United States do not like to be humiliated.

That is what I believe is going on here. This, I believe, explains the visceral reaction we have seen in opposition to this deal. Americans feel that our concessions not just to any country, but to the world's No. 1 sponsor of terrorism, have gone so far that they are humiliating to our great country. People feel that our concessions have gone so far, it is as if we are treating Iran as an equal, and Iran is not an equal to the United States of America.

I first started to realize this and sense it during a closed briefing with Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. She was sent to brief the Senate on the secret side deal between the IAEA and Iran involving the inspection regime at the Parchin military facility, long suspected as Iran's premier nuclear weapons facility. Senator McCain spoke about this briefing yesterday. For those of us--again, Democrats and Republicans--who went to this briefing, it was pretty remarkable, and I am not saying that in a positive way. It was actually unbelievable to have a senior member of the Obama negotiating team first begin the briefing by telling us she had seen this secret side deal, but she didn't have a copy of it, and she wasn't allowed to have a copy of it because it was just between Iran and the IAEA. So the Iranians had it, they were reading it, but not us. No matter that the President had just signed a law--the Corker-Cardin law--that required the administration to provide this agreement to the Congress. No matter that the United States is a board member of the IAEA--not only a board member; we are the country that came up with the idea of the IAEA. This was an American initiative in the 1950s. Our board member could have demanded this agreement, but we were told it was just between Iran and the IAEA.

This, of course, was an affront to the law, to the American people, but the worst was yet to come. Under Secretary Sherman then actually described the substance of this secret side deal, the essence of which we all know now because it was eventually leaked to the press. Here is the essence of that side deal: Iran will conduct the inspections at the Parchin nuclear facility by themselves, with no one else present. Let me repeat that. No one else is allowed in that facility. Iran will conduct the inspections by itself. They will take air samples. They will take environmental samples. She was literally describing Iranian officials with a camera filming themselves in the facility with no one else there, and they were going to give this film and these samples--whose chain of custody we can't trust--to IAEA officials, who are not allowed in the facility.

Every jaw in that room dropped, every Senator--Democrat, Republican. I remember looking around the room. We couldn't believe it. Heads were shaking. The U.S. Senate was stunned.

After claims by the President that his agreement had the most intrusive inspection regime ever, after being told by the President that his agreement had nothing to do with having to trust Iran--it wasn't about trusting Iran--we are told in a briefing by one of his top negotiators that with regard to the most suspicious nuclear weapons facility site in Iran, the Iranians will inspect themselves.

The AP broke the story, and when they did, they stated that the secret side deal at Parchin will ``let the Iranians themselves look for signs of the very activity they deny--past work on nuclear weapons.''

Let me repeat that. This is the AP. The side deal--that we are agreeing to, by the way, in the Senate, or that some of my colleagues are--will ``let the Iranians themselves look for signs of the very activity they deny--past work on nuclear weapons.''

This secret side deal is absurd on its face. This secret side deal will let Iran cheat with impunity. This secret side deal is fully and unequivocally based on trusting the Iranians, regardless of what the administration officials say about the deal. And this secret side deal is not just some kind of concession; it is a humiliation. The IAEA has never done this with any country, ever--especially a country that is a serial cheater and continues to be the world's No. 1 sponsor of international terrorism.

For these reasons alone, as Senator Perdue mentioned yesterday, the Senate should reject the President's deal. It certainly doesn't square with many of the demands in the March 2014 Senate letter from 83 U.S. Senators last year, one of which was: We believe Iran must fully resolve concerns addressed in the United Nations Security Council resolutions, including any military dimensions of its nuclear program.

Well, that is not going to happen in Parchin. We believe Iran must also submit to a long-term and intrusive inspection and verification regime--83 Senators said this to the President. That is not going to happen at Parchin either. But these kind of absurd concessions go much further than the Parchin inspection side deal, and they are the driving force for why so many Americans reject this deal so overwhelmingly.

When we agreed to lift sanctions on General Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, that wasn't a concession, that was a humiliation. Senator Ernst said last night it was a slap in the face to our veterans, many of whom were killed by IEDs supplied by General Soleimani.

When the leader of Russia, one of our so-called international partners, met with General Soleimani recently to discuss arms transfers, that wasn't a concession, that was an outrage.

When the United States, in the President's agreement, states that it wants ``a new relationship with Iran'' and they don't respond in kind in the agreement but respond by saying ``Death to America'' in their weekly chants, that is not a concession, that is a humiliation.

When we agree in the agreement to ``protect Iran from nuclear security threats, including sabotage''--that is in the agreement--that is not a concession, that is an outrage.

When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that under no circumstances should Iran ever obtain ballistic missiles and only days later the Secretary of State agrees to lift the ban on ballistic missiles and conventional weapons, that is not a concession, that is an abdication.

When we go into minute detail in this agreement--dozens of pages on our obligations to lift sanctions, including our obligations to literally import Iranian pistachios--that kind of detail--yet we can't get four American hostages released, that is not a concession, that is a humiliation.

Finally, when we give the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism upfront relief and tens of billions of dollars in a signing bonus and we are told by administration officials that certainly Iran is going to use some of those proceeds to conduct terrorism activities against Americans and our allies, that is not a concession, that is a surrender.

It is a culmination of the so-called concessions that give our constituents the sinking feeling that the President's agreement is decidedly not in our interest. That is dangerous for our country, and it is the scope and number of these concessions that solidify the sense that during these negotiations we have slowly and subtly ceded our power to a country that just recently was considered the world's No. 1 pariah state.

When these negotiations began, every country in the world was standing against Iran and international sanctions were crippling them. That is what brought them to the table, as Senator Corker mentioned earlier today. And guess what. This was due not to the international community's leadership, not to China, not to Russia, not to the European Union, this was due to the leadership of the United States of America, the Members in the Democratic Party and Republican Party of the Congress, and members of the Bush administration and the Obama administration. That is what brought them to the table--American leadership, Congress, and the executive branch working together.

Remarkably, the deal the President and the administration have negotiated has flipped all of this on its head. It is incredible that we are at this point, as if we are treating Iran as an equal, blessed by all the world's great powers. Make no mistake, we are, as Senator Cardin and others mentioned--this deal legitimizes Iran's nuclear program and it blesses Iran as a threshold nuclear power.

So the question has to be asked: Why not stick the original goals set out by the Senate just a year ago, in 2014, in the letter to the President to dismantle Iran's nuclear capabilities, to prevent them from having enrichment capability.

Well, according to the President, he has stated, ``There is no one who thinks that Iran would or could ever accept that, and the international community does not take that view that Iran can't have a peaceful nuclear program.''

The Congress of the United States and the Senate of the United States thought that just a year ago. So it is remarkable that the President says now there is no way we can get that done. Why not go back to Iran and the P5+1 and get a better deal, one without the serious flaws that so many Members, Democratic and Republican, have stated over the last week?

In a remarkable interview with the Atlantic Monthly, Secretary Kerry talks about how, if we sought a better deal, if he went back and sought a better deal--a deal, by the way, that 83 Senators said we needed to have--we would be ``screwing Iran and the Ayatollah, and we will be confirming the Ayatollah's suspicion that the United States is untrustworthy.'' That is a quote from the Secretary of State of the United States. In another interview, Secretary Kerry said he would ``be embarrassed'' to go out and try for a better deal.

What is most remarkable of all is that in attempts to sell this deal to the Congress and the American people, the President and his team no longer emphasized that Iran, the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism, is isolated, is a pariah state, but instead they emphasized that our most important ally in the Middle East, Israel, is, and so, too, is the Congress, and so, too, will be the United States if we don't approve the President's deal.

On August 5, the President stated that ``every nation in the world that has commented publicly supports this agreement, except Israel.'' And U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, our Ambassador, recently stated, ``If we walk away, there is no rewrite of the deal on the table. We would go from a situation in which Iran is isolated to one in which the United States is isolated.''

This rhetoric represents a fundamental shift in a world view. We have been debating this Iranian deal for the past week, but we really are debating America's role in the world. There is a world view that is taking hold with this administration, one where America is no longer the leader of the free world but a player as part of an international partnership, one where we don't lead by example but are being led by others, one where we are leading from behind, one where we are embarrassed--that is in the Secretary of State's words--rather than steadfast, and one where we are more worried about ``screwing'' the head of a pariah state than standing with our most steadfast ally in the region, the nation of Israel.

This kind of deal that we are debating today is what an echo chamber produces. This is what happens when you want a deal too badly, when you will not walk away from the table during negotiations, when your view of America's leadership role in the world is tentative, tepid, and not confident, and this is what happens when you fail to listen to the American people. This is what happens. Right turns wrong, good turns bad, a country that recently was a pariah state, the largest state sponsor of terrorism, is steering the negotiations and welcomed to the community of nations, and top officials in the United States of America are afraid that we will become isolated if we demand a stronger deal that keeps us and our allies safe. This, in effect, is how bad and dangerous policy is made.

I would like to conclude by talking about our role with regard to this agreement. History has shown that on most major foreign policy issues, when the United States of America is most effective and most strong is when the Congress and the Executive are working together. That is the way our Constitution was structured, and that has been America's history since the founding of the Republic. The examples abound from this Chamber. The Louisiana Purchase--something important to you, Mr. President--passed the Senate, bipartisan majority vote 24 to 7; NATO was ratified by bipartisan majority, 82 to 13; the first strategic arms limitations negotiations with the Soviet Union, bipartisan majority, 88 to 2; even something as controversial as relinquishing control of the Panama Canal to Panama, bipartisan majority, 68 to 32.

More recently in 2010, this body voted to further reduce nuclear arms with the Russians, bipartisan majority, 71 to 26.

One common area of agreement is that everybody who has talked about this agreement this week on both sides of the aisle has stated it was one of the most important national security issues facing the United States in a generation, whether and how and to what degree the world's largest sponsor of terrorism is going to obtain a nuclear weapon.

But perhaps for the first time in U.S. history, an agreement that is so grave and important for the national security of our great Nation is going to move forward, not with a bipartisan majority in the U.S. Senate but a partisan minority in both Houses. Such result will undermine America's strength and I believe shows a profound disregard for our constitutional form of government. Even the Iranian Parliament is going to need a majority to pass this agreement, but the world's greatest democracy will not, and I believe that is another humiliation.

Finally, just a few hours ago we saw what has been a theme throughout this entire process--how the administration has been dismissive of the American people, not wanting a role for the American people through their representatives in Congress to weigh in on this deal.

If the President is so proud of this agreement, he shouldn't be directing Democrats to filibuster it. I believe the vote we just took is a sad day for the U.S. Senate. If this deal was good for the country and our allies, I would certainly be gladly supporting it, but it is not, and a bipartisan majority of the Senate knows it. That is why a bipartisan majority of this body is voting against it. We are doing so because it is a bad deal, a deal that will make the world more dangerous, and we are doing so because the American people see that, too, and they are counting on us to protect them.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source