Providing for Congressional Disapproval of a Rule Submitted by the National Labor Relations Board -- Veto

Floor Speech

Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I come to the floor to speak for a few
minutes on the bill we are debating to provide some congressional
oversight over a potential--though not yet signed--deal with Iran.

I wish to start simply with what we all agree on. We all agree we
need to do whatever we can to ensure that Iran never obtains a nuclear
weapon. I have no doubt that 100 Members of the Senate would agree with
that proposition. That is our guiding principle, and it should be our
North Star. We may disagree on the best way to achieve a nuclear
weapons-free Iran, but we can all agree on our goal.

So how do we get there is the question we are debating. I happen to
be a member of the camp who believes our best hope of achieving this
goal is through diplomacy, through a negotiated settlement that
dramatically rolls back Iran's nuclear program in a transparent and
verifiable way. While our negotiations still have a long way to go to
get to that agreement, we are closer now than we have been in decades.
I, and many of my colleagues, strongly believe we should give our
negotiators the space to do their jobs and to see if a deal is
ultimately possible.

That is really what this bill does. It postpones a congressional vote
on these negotiations, appropriately, until the negotiations are
finished. That makes sense, right? There is no use on voting on a deal
when we don't have a deal. And then it sets up time constraints for
Congress's review of that potential deal, basically, about 30 days.
That is a reasonable period of time for us to debate the agreement,
and, if there is one, there is some certainty over our process to those
who are at the negotiating table.

The President's critics seem to fall into two often overlapping
camps. One strain of argument holds that this framework agreement we
have right now is just too weak and that our side should walk away from
the table, reimpose sanctions, and hold out for a better deal.

The second strain of argument--evidenced, frankly, by many of the
amendments that have been filed to the underlying bill--holds that our
negotiations shouldn't be just about Iran's nuclear program, that we
should also be negotiating over all of the other bad things Iran does
and supports.

Now, I don't think it is worth getting into a defense of a framework
today since we are months away from a final deal. But to my mind, if
the final deal does look demonstrably like the framework, we would be
fools to reject it. Does it allow Iran to do nuclear research? Yes, it
does. Does it allow them to keep some centrifuges? Yes. But anybody who
thought we were going to sign a deal that would effectively be an
unconditional surrender was living in a fantasyland. The framework
accomplishes our goal of protecting Israel, the region, and the United
States from a quick nuclear breakout. The plutonium pathway at Arak is
ended. Their enriched stores basically go down to zero. Fordow and
Natanz stay open, but they can no longer do substantial enrichment, and
they are going to have international scientists and inspectors crawling
all over their capacity. Inspections, on the entire nuclear supply
chain, will be at a scale that is totally, completely unprecedented in
the history of the nuclear age.

It is a good framework. But even if you don't believe this, I just
think it belies common sense to think that walking away from the table
now would get you a better deal. Yes, we could reinstitute sanctions,
the United States could. Perhaps some of our partners would go along,
but they would be weaker than before because lots of countries that
think this is a good framework wouldn't go along with this. Just look
at what Russia and China have announced in the past few weeks. They
basically have telegraphed that they are looking to do business with
the Iranians, notwithstanding what happens at the negotiating table. We
know what happens when we apply weak sanctions against Iran, alongside
a policy of isolating. They get stronger.

How do we know this? Because in 2002 we had a chance to cap Iran's
centrifuges at a few hundred. Instead, after years of relatively weak
sanctions and international isolation, Iran built 20,000 centrifuges
and put in place a secret nuclear facility.

Now, our most recent round of tough international sanctions--in part
because of the policies of this Congress--worked to get to the table,
to the negotiating table, but only because there was a credible offer
of a negotiated solution. We know exactly what happens, what sanctions
and isolation get us, because we tried it for years. It gets us 20,000
centrifuges, no international inspections, and an increasingly hard-
line and inward-looking regime.

This last point and result is important because the people of Iran
actually don't think like their Supreme Leader. His grasp on power
isn't absolute, in large part because Iranians are much more moderate,
much more internationalist, and much more pro-American than their
leader, generally.

Khamenei knows this, and that is why, when Iranian voters elected a
moderate, Western-oriented President, the Supreme Leader allowed his
team the space to negotiate this framework.

Now, no one can be certain, but it is certainly plausible to believe
that moderate forces inside Iran are winning and that our policy toward
Iran should consider whether our actions help the moderates or help the
hard-liners. We don't want another hard-line administration, but we are
going to get one if we walk away from these negotiations now, when
thousands of Iranians are cheering the opening of relations with the
West. If we walk away, moderate voters are going to feel abandoned.
Hard-liners will be proven right. The two groups will be merged.
Politics inside Iran will shift inward and extreme again. For all of my
Republican colleagues who were so forceful in their criticism of the
administration, saying President Obama didn't do enough to support the
Green Revolution, you would do far more damage to this cause by ending
reformers' hopes of rapprochement with the West right now.

Now, for the second argument--that we should settle all of our
grievances with Iran in one fell swoop right now, that this agreement
is somehow illegitimate unless Iran renounces Hamas and Hezbollah,
unless they get right with Israel, unless they end their other
nonnuclear weapons programs, unless they release political prisoners,
and so on and so on.

First, there is not a single person here who agrees with Iran's
support for terrorism or its inflammatory rhetoric toward Israel. No
one is pleased with the Iranian regime's record on human rights or its
funding of Hezbollah.

But let's agree that an Iran that pursues these policies and has a
nuclear weapon is a far worse outcome, one that should be avoided at
all costs. The truth is that adding these issues into the nuclear
agreement would mean no deal is possible.

In America, we are strong enough to be able to walk and chew gum at
the same time. We can negotiate with an enemy or adversary on one issue
and reserve the right to fight another day or simultaneously on other
issues. For evidence of this, I would ask my Republican friends to
simply look to their great, romanticized hero, President Ronald Reagan.
When he was negotiating a nuclear weapons deal with the Soviet Union,
he did not simultaneously try to address the USSR's support for proxies
in Central America or the Middle East or their provocative naval
activities in the Pacific Ocean, he knew that by taking one issue off
the table it would make America and the world safer, even if it didn't
address all of our grievances at once. He knew if he did put everything
on the table all at once, then there would be no progress.

Just as a little kid can't eat a hot dog all in one bite no matter
how hard he tries, we all have to make progress
one bite at a time. That is often how life and, in fact, negotiations
tend to work.

So I hope my colleagues will oppose these well-meaning amendments
that are being offered. They have laudable goals, but in the real world
they are simply unrealistic within the confines of these negotiations,
and they will have the effect of killing the deal entirely.

On a broader scale, I hope when this debate is done, we can also ask
ourselves some bigger questions. Diplomacy is power. It is not
weakness. Talking to your enemies has been part of our national
security toolbox for as long as we have existed as a nation.

This country is tired. It is weary of war for good reason. Ten years
of conflict in Iraq didn't make us any safer, and a lot of people--
heroes--died in the process.

But when we spend all of this time--the majority of this Congress--
engaged in detailed oversight over the President's diplomatic endeavors
and absolutely no time engaged in detailed oversight over a war in Iraq
and Syria that is still, months and months later, unauthorized and
extraconstitutional, then we send a bad message to America and to the
rest of the world. We seem to have a developing double standard when it
comes to oversight. We are all over the President when he talks to our
adversaries, but we stand down when he fights them--lots of oversight
over peace, very little over war.

That is not where the American people are. They want their President
to take extraordinary steps to avoid war. They don't want us to get
dragged back into a ground war in the Middle East.

I am supporting this bill today because I will be first in line to
reassert Congress's power to set foreign policy right alongside the
President, but I don't support Congress sending a message that
diplomacy is somehow more worthy of rigorous oversight than military
action.

I don't think this is where the chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee is coming from, but there are certainly some Members of his
caucus who view power solely through a military lens. That is dangerous
because, as we saw in Iraq, large-scale military operations kill a lot
of terrorists, they kill a lot of bad guys, but they often create two
for every one they kill.

In the end, it is nonkinetic intervention that solves extremism,
building inclusive governments, lifting people out of destitution and
poverty, countering radical propaganda, and showing an America that
backs up all of its talk about American civil liberties with action.

I am so thankful to Chairman Corker for taking the time to work on
this bill with Senator Cardin, Senator Menendez, and others to make it
something we can truly rally around today. That takes guts to show
patience, to give ground, and to talk to people whom you don't agree
with.

It is actually diplomacy that wins the day here more often than not.
It is our guiding value as a body, as an institution. It is what makes
this place work when it works, and we are best when we recognize that
the value of diplomacy and the results we get from it do not expire at
the edges of this Chamber.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source