House Republicans Threaten Lawsuit to Block Iran Deal

The Senate leadership failed in their effort to block the Iran deal today, and while they intend to keep plugging away with unlikely resolution, the House Republican leadership appears to be playing the sore loser, passing a hostile resolution and talking up the idea of filing a lawsuit to block US implementation of the pact.

The House vote, a 245-186 vote that went 100% on party lines, sought to overcome the upcoming September 17 deadline for Congressional review on the Iran deal by saying they think the 60-day review period hasn’t officially started because the IAEA didn’t give Congress the text of all confidential side deals with Iran.

The resolution itself isn’t expected to have any actual meaning, however, so to that end Rep. Matt Salmon (R – AZ) revealed that the House is shifting its focus away from resolutions and toward filing a lawsuit, hoping the court will block US involvement in the deal that way.

Both houses of Congress were touting the 60-day review period initially, figuring it was plenty of time for them, backed by tens of millions of dollars in AIPAC lobbying to get a veto-proof majority in both the House and Senate. Now that it’s clear there’s no chance of that happening in the Senate, they’re moving on to increasingly less plausible ways to try to kill the deal.

Since the deals the White House “didn’t send Congress” were not the nuclear deal itself, and were rather deals between Iran and the IAEA which the US was never a party to in the first place, it’s hard to imagine courts agreeing this means that the “whole deal” wasn’t given to Congress.