THE NEW YORK TIMES
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| Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, will oppose President Obama's deal |
WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer, the most
influential Jewish voice in Congress, said Thursday night that he would oppose President Obama’s deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program.
“Advocates on both sides have strong cases for their
point of view that cannot simply be dismissed,” Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New
York, said in a lengthy statement. “This has made evaluating the agreement a
difficult and deliberate endeavor, and after deep study, careful thought and
considerable soul-searching, I have decided I must oppose the agreement and
will vote yes on a motion of disapproval.”
Mr. Schumer had spent the last several weeks carrying a
dog-eared copy of the agreement in his briefcase and meeting with Mr. Obama and
officials like Wendy R. Sherman, the deal’s chief negotiator. With his
decision, he paves the way for other Democrats on the fence to join Republicans
in showing their disapproval.
“There are some who believe that I can force my
colleagues to vote my way,” Mr. Schumer said. “While I will certainly share my
view and try to persuade them that the vote to disapprove is the right one, in
my experience with matters of conscience and great consequence like this, each
member ultimately comes to their own conclusion.”
As if on cue, Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York,
the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who was widely
expected to oppose the deal, announced his opposition Thursday night.
Mr. Schumer’s announcement comes as Representative Nancy
Pelosi of California, the minority leader, labors to build a firewall in the
House in support of the deal, which has been denounced by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. At six meetings in recent weeks, Ms. Pelosi has
assembled an informal team of Democrats determined to win over the 146 House
Democrats needed to uphold a veto.
But Ms. Pelosi’s team had had its eye on Mr. Schumer,
conceded Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois and one of Ms.
Pelosi’s deputies on the Iran deal. Ms. Schakowsky said that Democratic leaders
had never put Mr. Schumer “in the ‘yes’ column,” but that “the calculation
still is we’ll have the votes” even without him.
So far, 12 Senate Democrats and one Democratic-leaning
independent, Senator Angus King of Maine, have announced their support for the
deal. Two others, Senator Bernie Sanders, a liberal independent from Vermont,
and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed
Services Committee, have all but announced their support.
Support for the deal by Mr. King, Senator Tim Kaine of
Virginia and Senator Bill Nelson of Florida had given momentum to the accord.
And an announcement Thursday by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New
York, that she would support the deal had given supporters a boost.
But Mr. Obama needs 34 votes to sustain a promised veto
of legislation disapproving the deal, which Republican leaders in the House and
the Senate have promised to pass in September.
A veto override would be an enormous blow to the
president’s prestige. It would torpedo an agreement between Iran and six powers
— the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China — but it would
not necessarily lead to the reimposition of crippling economic sanctions on
Iran, supporters of the deal warn. With the other world powers supporting the
agreement, the international sanctions regime would be likely to crumble,
leaving the United States with far less effective tools to cripple Iran’s
nuclear ambitions.
With so much on the line, Senate Democrats on the Foreign
Relations Committee, such as Mr. Kaine, had hoped to not only rally the 34
senators needed to sustain a presidential veto, but also to possibly keep
enough Democrats behind the president to filibuster a resolution of disapproval next
month. To do that, they most likely could lose only five Democrats. Mr.
Schumer’s break with Mr. Obama will make that far more difficult.
Like many Jewish Democrats, Mr. Schumer approached the
agreement under pressure from his constituents, the administration, and his own
personal history and faith. He read the agreement for the first time in his
Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment on the Sunday evening after the deal was
announced and reread it over the following week, including the separate
agreements between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Besides individual meetings with Mr. Obama, Ms. Sherman
and Secretary of State John Kerry, Mr. Schumer had three hourlong meetings with
members of the negotiating team during which he received answers to 14 pages’
worth of questions on the agreement.
Ultimately, Mr. Schumer wrote his statement on his
decision alone in his Senate office with a pen and yellow legal pad.
“I examined this deal in three parts: nuclear
restrictions on Iran in the first 10 years, nuclear restrictions on Iran after
10 years, and nonnuclear components and consequences of a deal,” he wrote. “In
each case I have asked: Are we better off with the agreement or without it?”
Mr. Schumer said that the inspection regime in the first
10 years of the agreement would be too weak, and that provisions to reimpose
sanctions if Iran cheated were too onerous. He said his most serious concerns
were with the freedom that Iran would have after 10 years to quickly build a
nuclear weapon.
“To me, after 10 years, if Iran is the same nation as it
is today, we will be worse off with this agreement than without it,” he said.
