Iran Terror Finance Transparency Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I voted for every sanctions bill on Iran that has come to this floor--I helped draft many of them--and I am ready to help draft, work on, and vote for sanctions bills on Iran because Iran continues its behavior in the area of missiles, and terrorism, and keeps seizing American hostages. I am ready to work on and support legislation to impose sanctions on Iran even if it is opposed by the administration. After all, almost every sanctions bill passed by this Congress was opposed either by the George W. Bush administration or this administration.

We need a good process to draft good legislation that will do what President Obama told us we would do, and that is use sanctions to deal with Iran's nonnuclear wrongdoing. But we need a good process that will get us good legislation. Unfortunately, this is a bill that is the product of a bad process, a flawed process, and the bill itself is flawed.

Let's look at the process.

Almost 100 cosponsors, but all of them from one party. No Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee was invited to help draft the legislation or even invited to cosponsor it. Now this bill comes to the floor under a closed rule, a rule that prevents us from offering amendments that will deal with the flaws in the bill. There are at least two such flaws.

The first is that the bill deprives the President of the authority to delist 489 entities. It locks those entities onto the SDN list, but it leaves out 269 other entities, creating two classes of entities: one which must stay on the list under almost any circumstance I can think of, the other which the President can remove. And there is no particular reason for the 269 entities to be treated differently than the 489. All of them have been involved in supporting Iran's proliferation and terrorist efforts.

Second, this bill creates too high a standard for the President to be able to remove an entity. He has to certify that it has never at any time in history engaged in even the most trivial transaction with a whole list of terrorist entities. We need a better drafting of that portion of the bill that deals with delisting entities, perhaps entities that have changed their behavior for well over a decade.

I look forward to a bipartisan process and to, hopefully, an open rule. We see that reflected in the fact that I have introduced legislation, as just an example, that would impose additional sanctions on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and that is sponsored by the chairman of our committee and by the immediate past chairman of our committee.

I know our committee can work in a bipartisan way to create better legislation than that which is before us, and we need additional sanctions on Iran drafted carefully because Iran has engaged in a missile test in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, because Iran's support for terrorism and Assad is responsible for the deaths of tens and tens of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of people in Syria and Yemen and because Iran used to hold four, but now holds five, American hostages. Fortunately, it does not hold our U.S. Navy sailors, but it holds five American civilians.

It is consistent with American policy and with this administration's policy. They negotiated a nuclear deal. They kept it only on the nuclear issue not because America has conceded and has accepted and has given Iran carte blanche to engage in terrorism and hostage-taking, but because the President's policy was that we would deal with these issues separately. It is time for us to deal with these issues separately through well-drafted, bipartisan legislation.

I am confident that, in the weeks to come, the administration will use its existing power to sanction additional entities as a result of Iran's illegal missile test, and I am confident that our committee will craft bipartisan legislation that will do what we know we need to do to deal with Iran's wrongdoing outside the nuclear area.

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