‘Congress won’t take on Obama on Iran’
If the Obama administration decides to suspend sanctions against Iran, Congress will go along with the decision, an American politician says.
Art Olivier, the former mayor of Bellflower, California, who was also the Libertarian candidate for vice president in the US presidential election in 2000, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Thursday.
He was commenting on US Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that the White House does not need congressional approval to lift Iran sanctions.
The Obama administration is reportedly planning to lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic without an immediate vote in Congress, but it says lawmakers will have the final word on whether to permanently terminate the sanctions.
“Congress does have the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, that’s one of the few limited powers they do have. And if the administration decides to lift the sanctions, then Congress could try to enforce the sanctions,” Olivier said.
“But this is something that’s really never done, very seldom done in the United States anymore. When the administration makes a decision, Congress usually ends up going along with it. And they don’t challenge it,” he added.
“But theoretically they could challenge it. Congress could vote to continue the sanctions. The administration/the president could veto that vote, then the Congress could override the veto by two-thirds votes from both houses. This is very rarely ever done. And I don’t think it will happen. I think that Congress will go along with it,” the Libertarian politician noted.
At a press conference in Berlin, Kerry said, “On sanctions, what we’ve merely said to people is that — and we’ve said this in public testimony as well as in private conversations — that in the first instance, we would look to suspend sanctions, which the president can do, simply because that’s the necessary way to proceed with respect to the negotiations themselves.”
The plan, first revealed by The New York Times on Sunday, does not suggest that the US Congress will be sidestepped on any nuclear deal with Iran, Kerry said.
The top US diplomat said that administration officials were engaged in “a regular series of briefings” with lawmakers on the issue, emphasizing that “Congress has an extremely important role to play in this.”
Iran and the P5+1 group– Russia, China, France, Britain, the US and Germany – are negotiating to narrow their differences over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy program ahead of a November 24 deadline.
Sources close to the Iranian negotiating team say the main stumbling block to resolving Western disputes over Iran’s nuclear issue is the removal of sanctions, not the number of centrifuges or the level of uranium enrichment.
In July, the US representative in nuclear talks, Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, testified that the White House would consult with Congress but did not need its approval to suspend sanctions against Iran.
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