Hire More Heroes Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I would like to thank the majority leader for scheduling this debate about the agreement struck by the Obama administration and the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is important to highlight right up front what this deal is. It is nothing more than a political agreement between President Obama and the current leaders of Iran. This deal does not have the support of the American people, nor will it have the consent of their elected representatives here in Congress. At no point in the course of negotiating this deal did the Obama administration seek the advice and consent of the Senate or display any respect for the constitutional limits of the Executive in foreign affairs.

Nevertheless, I am glad the Senate has been debating this agreement because this is how the Senate is supposed to function, on the basis of open and robust deliberation. I hope it is how the Senate will function well into the future on matters of national security and domestic policy.

But if the debate we are trying to have today could be congressional deliberation at its best, the Obama administration's deal with Iran is the product of diplomacy at its worst. As the negotiations neared completion earlier this year, President Obama began building his case for the deal on the specious claim that the only alternative to the deal was war.

This black-or-white setup--the notion that the art of statesmanship is little more than navigating a series of binary either-or propositions--is plainly absurd. It misses the mark. We learned this from the fiasco following the New START treaty in 2010. At that time, President Obama and Secretary Clinton warned that it was the only way to reset the relationship with Russia. But now, 5 years later, we know it was, in fact, the starting point for the worst era of U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War. But the Obama administration has repeated this ``my way or war'' maxim with such faithful devotion and emotional conviction that it appears at some point along the way they began to believe it themselves. They actually started to believe it, even thought it was wrong.

Just look at the facts regarding this deal.

Fact No. 1: The centerpiece of the agreement is the lifting of significant portions of the multilateral financial, energy, and transportation sanctions currently imposed against Iran. Lifting these sanctions--lifting them prior to any meaningful action by Iran in exchange--will immediately give the world's largest supporter of terrorism access to tens of billions of dollars in currently frozen assets. That is just on day one. Welcoming Iran with open arms to the global marketplace will provide untold future riches to Tehran's revolutionary government.

The current sanctions are not perfect, but they are in place for a very good reason: to restrict Iran's access to resources we know its radical leaders will use to acquire nuclear weapons and continue exporting terrorism not only throughout the region but throughout the world. This is not a matter of speculation. It is not a matter of hyperbole. It is exactly what Iran's own leaders have told us in no uncertain terms.

Those sanctions were originally put in place in response to Iran's repeated violations of previous nuclear agreements. It is complete fantasy to believe they can be revived in the future when--not if but when--they cheat on this deal.

Fact No. 2: Nothing in the agreement will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. It won't. Under the terms of this deal, the Iranian Government will be allowed to conduct research on more advanced nuclear centrifuges after only 8 years. After 15 years, there will be no limits whatsoever on their nuclear fuel production--no limits whatsoever. To believe that this deal will stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program requires an act of blind faith. In fact, it requires us to disregard the facts altogether.

Fact No. 3: This agreement will increase Iran's access to conventional weapons and ballistic missiles. It will do this by providing for the removal of the U.N. conventional arms and ballistic missile technology embargo. If this seems out of place in an agreement that was supposed to be about Iran's nuclear weapons program, well, that is because it is.

It is entirely out of place for this type of an agreement. It was never supposed to be part of the deal. But you see, in the eleventh-hour negotiations, the Ayatollah demanded it, sensing--rightly--that the Obama administration was unlikely to object.

This deal is not the work of savvy negotiation. No, this deal is the product of desperate capitulation. For years, this administration has been dead set on reaching a deal, any deal with the mullahs in Iran. That is why they got the deal they did, an agreement that fulfills a wish list for the Iranians and the sprawling network of terrorist groups that depend on their largesse, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Bashar al-Assad's tyrannical regime in Syria.

And what does the United States get in exchange? Well, we get a promise from the Ayatollah to abandon Iran's 35-year quest for deliverable nuclear weapons--weapons they crave for the explicit purpose, as they put it, of wiping Israel off the face of the Earth and fulfilling the aspiration of their infamous motto ``Death to America.''

Evidently, this is good enough for the Obama administration and for the supporters of this deal, but it is not good enough for the American people--not even close.

In fact, the public opposes the proposed deal by a 2-to-1 margin, but not because they are clamoring for war with Iran. The truth is that most Americans would prefer a diplomatic solution to the problems posed by Iran's apocalyptic, nuclear, ambitious theocracy. But this is not a diplomatic solution. This diplomacy won't solve anything.

I would note that the public's overwhelming opposition to the Iran deal did not catch the Obama administration by surprise. In fact, public opposition to the deal was one of the primary reasons why the administration decided not to submit the agreement to the Senate for ratification as a treaty.

When Secretary Kerry testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee just a few weeks ago, I asked him to explain why the agreement with Iran was not submitted to the Senate as a treaty for ratification--ratification requiring two-thirds of the Members of this body who support it. His answer was, in effect, to say that the deal does not amount to a treaty because it is a multilateral agreement, one that involves more countries than just Iran and the United States.

But the inclusion of multiple parties to an international agreement has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on whether it can be considered a treaty. There is no shortage of examples of this, of examples of multilateral agreements that have been ratified by the Senate, including the Chemical Weapons Convention, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In fact, as I pointed out to Secretary Kerry at the time, the State Department's own Web site provides a definition of the word ``treaty'' that includes multilateral agreements, which is why I think the more honest and troubling answer was the one that he provided just 1 day earlier when Congressman Reid Ribble of Wisconsin asked Secretary Kerry the exact same question: Why does the Obama administration not consider the Iran deal to be a treaty?

This was Secretary Kerry's response to that question asked just 1 day earlier in the other body. Secretary of State John Kerry said as follows:

Well, Congressman, I spent quite a few years trying to get a lot of treaties through the United States Senate, and frankly, it's become physically impossible. That's why. Because you can't pass a treaty anymore.

This is indefensible. Secretary Kerry's appeal to expedience shows an ignorance of--or disdain for--both principle and precedent. The Senate has not lost the ability to ratify a treaty. No, the Senate is perfectly capable of ratifying treaties, as it did 160 times during the George W. Bush administration. It is just reluctant to ratify unpopular treaties and treaties that undermine U.S. interests. There is a distinction between these two types of treaties.

From the Obama administration's perspective, this is a problem with the Senate. But from the perspective of the Constitution, this is the purpose of the Senate, and it is exactly why the framers included the Senate in the treaty-making process.

Article II, section 2 of the Constitution states that the President ``shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two-thirds of the senators present concur.''

The sharing of the treaty-making power between the Executive and the Senate is not a quirk, nor is it optional. It is a constitutional command. Both branches are essential. They are essential to this process. Without both branches, you cannot make a treaty and have it take effect.

The Executive is best suited to manage negotiations with foreign nations, but only legislative consent can grant the kind of broad political consensus necessary to ensure that the United States lives up to the terms of an agreement in the long run.

In ``The Federalist,'' Alexander Hamilton defended the sharing of treaty-making power between the Executive and the Senate. He wrote: ``The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of [the] President of the United States.''

Of course, not all international agreements are treaties, and those that aren't do not need legislative consent in order to go into effect. But, historically, agreements that make long-term commitments or include significant changes to the United States' relationship to another country have been considered treaties and have, therefore, been submitted to the Senate for approval.

As I see it, the Iran deal fits both of these categories quite comfortably. The terms of the deal purport to extend well beyond President Obama's remaining time in office. According to the administration's own reckoning, this agreement will fundamentally alter the relationship between the United States and Iran.

People of good faith can disagree about whether the Iran deal should be considered a treaty or merely an executive agreement, though not on the farcical grounds provided by Secretary Kerry.

But this debate is worth having. This is the debate that we should be having. It is worth it for the sake of our national security and for the health of our political institutions, and it is a debate that must include the Senate, just as the Constitution itself requires.

The past few months have been a case study of the dysfunction and the danger that result when the Executive chooses to ignore, instead of engage with, the Senate in order to determine whether an international agreement should be considered a treaty.

The President's go-it-alone approach has become all too familiar in the realm of domestic policy.

President Obama has spent much of the last 6 1/2 years justifying his will-to-power Presidency on the basis of expediency. Constitutional restraints and historical precedent have only slowed--never stopped--the President's routine abuse of power to unilaterally impose his domestic policy preferences on the country. Now, with this Iran deal failing to receive the support of even half of the Senate, the President appears willing to extend his imperial Presidency, even to the area of foreign policy.

We must do everything in our power to stop this Iran agreement from receiving congressional sanction. The facts are clear. This is a bad deal for global security, it is a bad deal for our allies--including, especially, Israel, our strongest ally in the Middle East--and it is a bad deal for the American people. But we must also learn from this experience.

Later this year, the Obama administration will negotiate a major climate change agreement, what will be known as the Paris Protocol. Already the administration has indicated it does not intend to submit the protocol to the Senate for ratification, even though the agreement would call for a significant expansion of the already broad powers of our Federal regulatory regime.

It would empower unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to seize even more control over the American energy sector and insert themselves ever further into the everyday lives of the American people.

On account of its expected size, scope, cause, and effect on the American economy, failure to submit the Paris Protocol to the Senate as a treaty would be an unprecedented and dangerous abuse of Executive power.

Now is the time to make clear to ourselves, to the White House, and to the American people that the Senate understands and plans to defend the centrality of the treaty-making process to the negotiation of international trade agreements and the full and rightful role of the Senate in that important process.

I yield the floor.

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