Opposition

Bust: Iran opponents' August fail

The monthlong break was supposed to be the best window for critics to whip up opposition. It hasn't happened. 

By Burgess Everett and John Bresnahan

Critics of the Iran deal believed the August congressional recess was their best chance to scuttle the nuclear accord, as wavering lawmakers returned home to angry protesters and a barrage of TV ads. The longer the deal hung out there, they figured, the worse it would be for President Barack Obama.

Instead, the monthlong break has been a major bust.

Opponents of the Iran agreement — led by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, among others — are following through on pledges to spend $30 million-plus on a TV ad blitz and lobbying effort designed to whip up opposition to the measure. Republican leaders got a big lift from Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York when the Democratic leader-in-waiting came out against it. And opponents pounced when a secret deal with international inspectors that the GOP had long warned against was finally leaked, showing that Iran would be permitted to do its own sampling of a military site suspected of hosting past nuclear testing.

The anti-deal side also enlisted prominent former lawmakers, like ex-Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman and Mary Landrieu, to head up opposition groups, ginned up letters from retired military leaders and sent well-connected donors and activists to personally meet with Democrats still on the fence.

None of it has worked. Instead, a parade of House and Senate Democrats — even in red states — came out in favor of the deal. That eight-figure TV ad campaign has moved few, if any, Democratic lawmakers, and dovish groups like MoveOn.org are experiencing a surprising victory.

“Conventional wisdom seemed to be as this dragged through August the benefit would accrue to opponents of the deal,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn). “That has simply not been the case.”

A planned Sept. 9 rally against the deal featuring Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), meanwhile, threatens to drive wavering Democrats into the yes column. Cruz has questioned whether Democrats “value the lives and safety of millions of Americans more than they value partisan loyalty to the White House” — a message not likely to play well with undecided Democrats.

AIPAC also plans one final lobbying blitz before the planned mid-September vote on a resolution of disapproval of the Iran agreement, according to sources close to the group.

With momentum moving in Obama’s direction — on Sunday, Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley became the 31st Senate Democrat to endorse the Iran accord — the White House is now openly pushing to crush the resolution in the Senate. The hope is to prevent the resolution from ever reaching the president's desk, but if it does get through Congress, a veto looks certain to be sustained. Obama needs just three of the 13 undecided Democratic senators remaining to side with him; in the House, he appears to already have the votes to uphold a veto.

“I felt confident when we left [for the August recess] that we would have enough votes," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who is helping whip Democratic support. “That’s only been amplified over August.”

Schakowsky said members of the “core whip team” for House Democrats backing the agreement — which includes Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Reps. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, David Price of North Carolina and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut — went over their target list last week and “feel very confident we’re going to have 146 votes to sustain a veto.”

“House Democrats are meeting and listening to their constituents over the course of this month, and Leader Pelosi has been very pleased with the response from members,” said Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s spokesman. “As we come back into session, the leader will continue to be focused on getting members access to education and validation resources they require.”

Privately, Republican aides acknowledge they are “very close” to losing any ability to block the deal, but those leading the pricey outside effort to bring down the deal refuse to concede defeat. They want, at least, to get six more Senate Democrats to agree to pass the disapproval resolution and delay implementation of the deal.

Opponents are baffled that only 14 House Democrats and two Senate Democrats have sided with them. The polls are getting worse, Iranian leaders keep making impolitic comments and TV ads continue to hammer uncommitted lawmakers. What aren’t these Democrats seeing, they wonder?

“Obviously, it’s a little frustrating. You look at members: Are they favoring a lame duck president and marching themselves, their party and their country off a cliff?” asked former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), whose American Security Initiative has spent $10 million opposing the deal. That's double the amount invested by the liberal J Street group, the primary outside group funding ads in favor of the agreement.

“There’s a very strange disconnect now, which grows larger as every day goes by, between the way American people feel about the Iran agreement and the way members of Congress seem to feel,” said Lieberman, an independent who caucused with the Democrats and is now an architect of several big-dollar, anti-deal campaigns. “In public opinion, the high point was the day the agreement was announced.”

Still, rank-and-file Democrats never quite bought the notion of a public uprising against the agreement. Swing-vote senators scheduled few public events, denying opponents the chance to create embarrassing YouTube clips of them getting shouted down by protesters.

One such forum, held by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia, was dominated by Iran deal opponents but ignored by local media, a Democratic source said. A week later, Manchin posted thetextof the Iran deal to his Facebook page, and those who posted comments in response overwhelmingly urged him to vote no. Yet Manchin is still leaning toward backing the agreement.

“Democrats who believe the American people like this bad deal are fooling themselves. For years to come, supporters will have to explain why they trusted the dangerous Iranian regime,” said Emily Schillinger, a spokeswoman for House Speaker John Boehner.

Then there’s the matter of who is leading the opposition.

For some time, the White House hoped a Republican would back the deal, perhaps Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona. That hasn’t happened, but Obama has gotten the next best thing: The most credible opponents have been relatively low-key in taking on the White House during the past few weeks, while Trump, Cruz and other GOP presidential candidates have used increasingly incendiary language to denounce the agreement. That's only helped the White House, which has gone to great lengths to mollify nervous Democrats.

Firmly isolated in a caucus he's poised to lead in 2017, Schumer isn’t whipping members to side with him on the Iran deal. One Republican who might have swayed his Democratic colleagues against the deal, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), decided that's outside his job description.

“Am I on the phone all day lobbying people? No. I don't view that as my role,” Corker said in an interview. “What I’m not doing is whipping people. What I am doing is for those that are having to walk through the pluses and minuses.”

Administration officials are increasingly confident ahead of September votes on the Iran accord.

“We are encouraged by the growing number of lawmakers who have announced support for the deal in the past few weeks,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in an email.

With all the momentum behind the administration, some opponents are shifting their attention to how the next president can get more concessions from Iran. One is Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who met privately recently with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But other steadfast critics are still battling. United Against a Nuclear Iran, which Lieberman chairs, is preparing to unleash yet another ad against the deal. Coleman and Lieberman’s American Security Initiative is still up on the air. And after going dark for several days, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran is back on the air.

Patrick Dorton, spokesman for the Committee for a Nuclear Free Iran, the AIPAC backed-group spending more than $20 million on its anti-Iran deal efforts, said the organization is “in this fight until the end because this deal is dangerous. We have already won the support of a majority of Americans. The real question is will supporters get one-third of the House and the Senate to defy public opinion?”

At this point, opponents are banking on the shot-in-the-dark strategy of getting Democrats already on record in favor of the Iran pact to switch sides.

“You’ll see ads coming out to ask them to reconsider,” Coleman said. “It’s not going to get better for members.”