Four Articles on Iran Nuclear Arms Deal (By Date)

1. “Can Congress Stop the Iran Deal?” Washington Post, July 14, 2015, Amber Phillips

Pretty soon, Congress could have an up-or-down vote on President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.

But don't let your lawmaker fool you: It's not written in stone that Congress has the right to approve or disapprove of major international negotiations. It's not even a law.

The dirty little secret of U.S. international negotiations is this: Exactly how our government approves of most of this stuff is decided on a case-by-case basis.

Depending on what the president calls a deal with another country -- is it a treaty? an executive agreement? -- and the political movement du jour, a deal like the one with Iran could need a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate to be approved or could slide by without any vote at all.

What's happening right now is somewhere in the middle.

Confused? We were too. So we called up professor Charles Stevenson, an American foreign policy expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, for clarification.

Here's what you need to know to really understand what's going on with Congress and Iran -- and all other future negotiations.

It's all in the name

Let's go back to ninth-grade civics class for a minute.

A treaty is basically a formal agreement between two countries -- it could be to limit nuclear weapons, it could establish the United Nations, it could agree to international space law. The list goes on.

The Constitution says the Senate must approve any treaty the president wants to sign by a two-thirds majority vote. (As was alerted to us, it's a common misconception the Senate ratifies treaties: According to official Senate rules, it approves or disapproves of ratification of a treaty. But we digress.)

The point is, getting 67 senators to agree on complex international negotiations is difficult. So in the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt figured out a workaround: He simply wouldn't call his international negotiations treaties. There, problem solved. His "executive agreements" could now unilaterally be approved by him and only him.

"When is a treaty not a treaty?" Stevenson said. "When it's not called a treaty." Otherwise: "There's no other difference."

Naturally, other presidents picked up on this politically convenient avenue. According to some statistics, executive agreements are now signed in the United States more than treaties -- by a ratio of 10-to-1. (Also: In the eyes of international law, there's no difference between the two.)

"That's the way the presidents have been since at least FDR," Stevenson said. "If they think they can get away with it, they'll do an executive agreement."

In the 1960s, Congress caught on to this sly move and passed a law requiring presidents to notify the legislative branch of all executive actions signed. But that didn't really stop presidents from making treaties and calling them by another name. It just meant they had to give Congress notice.

(Obama threatens to veto bill stopping Iran deal)

During his speech announcing the nuclear deal with Iran, President Obama said he welcomed robust discussion of the agreement but would ultimately veto legislation that "prevents the successful implementation of this deal." (AP)

Here's what happens when Congress wants to chime in

By 2015, the precedent allowing Obama to be the sole approver of most of his deals with other countries has become clear. But sometimes Congress wants a say on these deals -- especially when it politically suits them to do so.

In that case, lawmakers must convince the president to let them have an up or down vote on the final deal. That's what happened with the Iran deal, which is unpopular with Republicans who don't want the United States to lift sanctions on the rogue nation. (Remember when GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote a letter to Iran's leaders urging them not sign a deal with Obama?)

So Congress reached an agreement with Obama under which it can vote to void any deal that is reached with Iran. With the deal now wrapped up, Congress could vote very soon. Obama's pretty safe, though, because as was clear even when he agreed to allow Congress to vote, he can veto any "no" vote if it passes both chambers in the Republican-controlled Congress. At that point, Republicans would need to get many Democrats to join them to overturn the veto.

As you may have guessed, congressional oversight of international deals can blow with the political winds of the moment. Stevenson pointed to a 2008 agreement between the United States and Iraq on how American troops would be treated in Iraq as a good example.

At first, leaders in the Democratic-controlled Congress thought they should vote on something so important and were about to ask President George W. Bush to give them that vote. But then they realized the deal included a date on when American troops would come home, and by approving it, they'd have to put their members on the record for the politically difficult decision. So they backed off and let the president ink the deal by himself.

Stevenson said the reverse happened in 2001 when Bush was signing a nuclear non-proliferation deal with Russia. Russian leaders wanted him to have to publicly defend the deal -- and therefore Russia -- so they would only cooperate if Bush agreed to make it an actual treaty.

One more thing….

There's one more international agreement we should mention: A trade agreement. With Obama narrowly getting approval from Congress last month to negotiate two of these deals with Europe and Pacific Rim nations, that's also been in the news recently.

[The trade deal, explained for people who fall asleep hearing about trade deals]

Trade agreements have much clearer standards for approval. A president wanting to make one usually goes to Congress and gets the OK to negotiate the deal -- a mechanism known as Trade Promotion Authority -- with informal input from Congress. (This is what Congress has provided Obama -- after some fits and starts.) As part of the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), Congress gets a final yea-or-nay vote on the deal.

Which in practice sounds a lot like the Iran deal. But it's not. It's a trade agreement. (And Stevenson thinks Obama should have gone to Congress a lot sooner to get authority to negotiate TPA. But that's a whole other post we'll write some other time.)

The big takeaway

OK, we hope we didn't confuse you too much. The basic thing we want you to take away from this is the difference between a treaty (which has to be approved by the Senate) and an executive agreement (a treaty-except-not-officially-called-that which doesn't have to be approved by the Senate but that sometimes Congress gets to vote on.)

And if you had to read that several times to get it, take heart that our country's method for approving international deals is so convoluted, it even confuses the experts.

"There are a lot of moving parts in this," Stevenson said, "and it's unclear to me which accelerator or brake is held in every case by the president, or the Congress or somebody else."

Foreign policy, ladies and gentlemen.

2. Why Obama’s Executive Action on Iran Does Not Violate the Law (National Review)

by John Yoo July 26, 2015 6:01 PM

Conservatives have much to criticize in President Obama’s deal with Iran on its nuclear program. The agreement allows Iran to operate sophisticated nuclear equipment, keep its suspected weapons labs open, and maintain stockpiles of nuclear material with ample opportunity to manipulate international inspectors. Washington and its allies must lift crippling sanctions and release $150 billion in frozen assets now, while hoping that Iran will refrain from developing an atomic bomb for the next decade.

Some conservatives may argue that Obama is violating the law, too. The Treaty Clause declares that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Instead of following this process, set out in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, President Obama plans to codify the deal as an executive agreement without the Senate’s supermajority approval. The Iran deal appears to run counter to decades of practice by the elected branches, which have used the Treaty Clause to make almost every significant arms-control agreement, such as the Test Ban Treaty, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the INF, and the START and New START pacts.

But critics of the Iran deal should save their strength when it comes to the Constitution. Last spring, Republicans in Congress created a process to review the agreement by majority vote. If Congress disapproves the deal, President Obama can still veto the resolution. In other words, two-thirds of the House and Senate will have to agree to stop the Iran deal — a bizarre inversion of the Treaty Clause.

Congressional Republicans may have scored a political victory by putting every Senate Democrat on the record on the Iran deal, but they have also inadvertently bolstered the deal’s legality. In foreign affairs, as the Supreme Court has observed, the president acts at the height of his constitutional powers when backed up by Congress. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, which blocked President Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills during the Korean War, Justice Robert Jackson famously observed: “When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” While only a concurrence (and one I tend to disagree with as a misreading of the separation of powers), Jackson’s approach has found its way into the justices’ majority opinions in recent foreign-affairs cases.

In providing a legal basis for the Iran deal, congressional Republicans have only themselves to blame. Nevertheless, conservatives are weighing legal challenges in court. This would be a waste of valuable resources.

First, a lawsuit would ask courts to stretch their jurisdiction beyond their proper scope. It is unlikely that such a challenge would arise from a plaintiff with standing — the requirement that the person who brings suit has suffered a discrete injury directly traceable to the government action. Simply claiming that the United States or the Constitution has suffered harm is not enough to walk into federal court. Conservatives have struggled for a generation to rein in judges who use flimsy lawsuits as an excuse to engage in policymaking and social engineering. To manufacture standing to bring a political dispute into court would descend to the level of liberal judicial activists who continue to use the judiciary to invent new rights and interfere with the proper balance of powers between the branches of government. The courts will probably turn away such a challenge, and they should.

Second, a lawsuit would foist an unduly narrow reading of the Treaty Clause on the nation’s foreign affairs. Not all international agreements must take the form of Article II treaties. Congress enacts some pacts — such as NAFTA, WTO, and the coming Trans-Pacific Partnership — as regular statutes through simple majority votes in Congress. Presidents have reached some agreements unilaterally, such as FDR’s recognition of the Soviet Union and Jimmy Carter’s deal to free the Iranian hostages.

The line between international agreements that must take the treaty form and those that need not remains obscure (for my own effort at explaining the difference, see my article “Laws as Treaties?: The Constitutionality of Congressional-Executive Agreements” in Michigan Law Review in 2000). I think that Congress can use laws in some areas, such as economic sanctions and trade, to make agreements because they fall within Congress’s exclusive authority under the Commerce Clause. Agreements that pose serious limits on the United States’ sovereignty and that make long-lasting military and security commitments, such as peace treaties and alliances, must take the form of treaties. Difficulty in finding the line between the two does not mean that the line is not there; nor does it mean that critics are right that the federal government can make international agreements only through the Treaty Clause.

In fact, the Iranian deal skirts the boundaries of a treaty in a way too clever by half — so clever, in fact, that it contains the seeds of its own undoing. Obama-administration officials argue that the agreement need not take the treaty form because it is not legally binding under international law. Instead, the deal represents a series of political commitments. There are neither agencies to enforce the agreement nor courts to resolve disputes. The agreement makes no commitment to future actions by the United States; nor does it limit our sovereignty, as would a promise to refrain from the use of military force. Its only significant promise is that Obama will grant a waiver under existing laws lifting economic sanctions under Iran, which as a presidential promise requires no new action by Congress.

Under this approach, though, the president who occupies the Oval Office in January 2017 can undo the deal with little delay. Presidents have long terminated treaties on their own, but the practice has generated controversy over the years and has never met with the definitive approval of the Supreme Court (though the justices refused to block President Carter’s termination of the Taiwan mutual-defense treaty, they could not agree on the reason). An unsparing textualist could argue that the Constitution should require the same method to unmake a treaty as to make it, while defenders of the presidency would respond that treaty termination, like firing inferior officers, remains with the executive branch. But whatever one’s stance on treaty termination, no one doubts that today’s president can undo the actions of earlier presidents. Just as a president can repeal earlier executive orders on his own, so too can a president terminate international agreement without anyone else’s say-so.

Obama’s defenders, and even some critics, might respond that the U.N.’s blessing of the Iran deal could restrain the next president’s freedom of maneuver. Last week, the administration won unanimous approval for the agreement in the U.N. Security Council, which under international law had to lift economic sanctions and reverse its prohibitions on Iran’s nuclear program (a humiliating request for American diplomats to make). Liberals no doubt will argue that the United States must obey the Security Council resolution under the U.N. Charter, a treaty that assumes the status of supreme federal law.

Security Council resolutions, however, do not bind the president as a matter of domestic law. In a series of cases where the International Court of Justice attempted to block the death penalty in the U.S., the Supreme Court made clear that the branches of the federal government owe no constitutional obeisance to international bodies. The next president can cross the Security Council, just as earlier presidents have ignored U.N. efforts to interfere with U.S. national-security objectives, such as the covert war against Nicaragua or battling with the Iranians in the Persian Gulf.

Third, a lawsuit demands that conservatives turn their back on their vigorous defense of presidential power in national security and foreign affairs. The Constitution contains startling silences, not least of which is the grant of control over foreign policy to either the president or Congress. The Framers explicitly split treaty-making between the president and Senate, gave the president the role of commander-in-chief and Congress the power to declare war and raise armies, and required that the Senate approve the president’s appointment of ambassadors. Political scientist Edwin Corwin famously observed that this arrangement created “an invitation to struggle” over directing foreign policy.

Into this textual vacuum, the president’s institutional advantages and historical practice have come to the fore. As Alexander Hamilton first argued in defense of President George Washington’s proclamation of neutrality in the French Revolution, Article I of the Constitution vested in Congress carefully limited powers, such as the power to regulate interstate commerce, declare war, and raise and support armies. Article II, however, vested in the president “the executive power,” without enumerating its content. Any power by nature executive, such as representing the nation in its foreign affairs, must accrue to the president, except for powers that the Constitution explicitly transferred elsewhere. “The general doctrine then of our Constitution is that the Executive Power of the Nation is vested in the President,” Hamilton concluded, “subject only to the exceptions and qualifications which are expressed in that instrument.”

Hamilton argued that the conduct of foreign relations was fundamentally executive in nature under British constitutional practice and the theories of Locke, Blackstone, and Montesquieu. Therefore, Article II’s vesting of executive power in the president gave Washington the right to decide not to intervene in what would become the Napoleonic Wars. It should be noted that Hamilton was not a fair-weather friend of executive power. During the ratification contest, he had argued as Publius in Federalist No. 72 that “the actual conduct of foreign negotiations,” “the arrangement of the army and navy,” and “the directions of the operations of war” should fall “peculiarly within the province of the executive department.”

Attacking Hamilton, Madison set out the case for congressional control over foreign affairs that endures to this day. He dismissed Locke and Montesquieu’s classification of foreign affairs as executive in nature, because they were “evidently warped by a regard to the particular government of England.” Making treaties and declaring war were legislative powers because they had the force of law; therefore, the president could not exercise them. “The natural province of the executive magistrate is to execute laws, as that of the legislature is to make laws,” Madison wrote. “All his acts therefore, properly executive, must presuppose the existence of the laws to be executed.” To allow the president a share of the legislative power “is an absurdity — in practice a tyranny.” Madison’s deeper argument was that placing the power to conduct war and to begin war in the same hands risked tyranny. “Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded.” According to Madison, “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.”

Madison’s arguments, however, failed. Washington proclaimed neutrality. Even Thomas Jefferson, who had urged Madison to attack Hamilton and who established the Democratic party to challenge Washington, would exercise broad executive authority once he moved into the Oval Office. Ever since the Hamilton–Madison debate, presidents have exercised the initiative in foreign affairs, punctuated by periods — such as the 1930s Neutrality Acts — in which Congress has used its power over international commerce and military funding to push the nation in a different direction. Conservatives have long defended the executive’s prerogatives in foreign affairs based on Hamilton’s arguments, from Nixon’s expansion of bombing in Vietnam, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, George H. W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War, and President George W. Bush’s war on terror and invasion of Iraq (on which I worked as an official in the Justice Department).

Today, conservatives disagree with President Obama’s use of these constitutional reservoirs of power to reach for the mirage of a rapproachment with Iran. But those same powers have served presidents from Lincoln, who invoked broad executive power to fight the Civil War and free the slaves, to FDR, who brought the nation into the war against the Axis powers, to Truman and Reagan, who, respectively, oversaw the Cold War at its beginning and toward its end. The next president will need those powers again when he or she quickly turns policy toward Iran in the opposite direction.

In the next weeks, conservatives will have ample opportunity to persuade the American people against the Iran deal on its merits. Presidential candidates will explain the steps they will take to undo the damage that Obama has inflicted on our national security. But they will make a serious mistake if they seek the short-term political end of defeating the Iran deal by crippling the Presidency’s long-term powers to defend the nation. — John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421621/iran-deal-constition-supports-obama-executive-action

3. “How To Block The Iran Deal” (Forbes)

Harold Furchtgott-Roth, Aug 31, 2015

The Obama administration negotiated a bad deal with Iran. The deal modifies the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which America is a signatory. As such, the Iran deal is inconsistent with the Corker-Cardin bill, and it should be considered separately.

Background

For decades, the Iranian government has supported international terrorism, held American prisoners, hindered our commerce, and expropriated our property. Iran has caused the death or injury of hundreds of American soldiers and civilians. It oppresses its own people and restricts their access to information. Since the negotiation of the deal, Iran has continued to threaten the United States in word and in deed almost daily.

Iran’s hostile acts are not limited to the United States. It threatens neighboring countries and brazenly seeks nuclear weapons. A signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has repeatedly and shamelessly violated its provisions by closing off nuclear sites to international inspectors.

As punishment for flouting the NPT, an international coalition of nations together with the UN over the past 10 years imposed sanctions and embargoes against Iran and froze its financial assets. The sanctions did not result in compliance with the NPT. But the sanctions did force Iran to the negotiating table. Over much of the past year, Iran negotiated with several governments including our own over the future of international economic sanctions and the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The negotiators’ objectives were clear. Iran sought to lift embargoes and sanctions and unfreeze its financial assets. The international community sought at the very least to have Iran return to compliance with the NPT.

It was under the premise of a negotiated compliance with the NPT that Senator Corker and Senator Cardin proposed a Congressional review process for an agreement with Iran. Their proposal became the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (the Corker-Cardin bill).

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The Agreement

In July, Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives from other countries signed a document with the Iranian government. The Iranian government achieved its two primary objectives in the agreement. Economic sanctions would be lifted as soon as the agreement came into effect, without any requirement of performance by Iran. Iranian assets worth perhaps $150 billion, much of which is personally controlled by the ayatollahs, would be unfrozen. That money would be available to keep the ayatollahs in power and to support their attacks on the Unites States and its allies.

The United States achieved none of its goals in the deal. Iran remains noncompliant with the NPT. Indeed, the agreement is nothing but an amendment to the NPT granting Iran an exception to the NPT.

Iran will not be accountable for past or future failures to comply with the NPT. The NPT is materially changed by the Iran deal. Under the NPT, international inspectors have access in non-nuclear countries such as Iran to any nuclear facility at any time. Under the Iran deal, the NPT provision does not apply. Instead, inspectors are limited to times and places approved by the Iranian government. According to an Iranian official, Iran will even have the power to select its inspectors. Moreover, for at least one nuclear weapons site, international inspections will be forbidden. The Iran deal conflicts with the NPT in other ways as well.

The repeated injuries to Americans over the past several decades, and the four Americans still held hostage by Iran, were not even addressed.

The purported case for the agreement

Nonetheless, the Administration insists the Iran agreement is a good deal because Iran promises that it will at least temporarily suspend its nuclear weapons program. The agreement, the Administration argues, will delay the day when Iran has nuclear weapons, and is the best deal that the United States could obtain in light of diminished support for continued sanctions. The Administration also claims that the deal will contribute to peace and stability by providing Iran’s government an opportunity to rejoin the community of nations and to engage with its neighbors.

Notwithstanding the flaws of the Iran deal, enough U.S. senators have bowed to pressure from the Administration or bought into its arguments so that the Iran deal will not be blocked by the Corker-Cardin process.

Is it an executive agreement or a draft treaty?

The Obama Administration insists the document is an “executive agreement” and not a treaty. Others, such as Andrew McCarthy, see it as a draft treaty, which requires a 2/3 Senate vote for ratification. Still others, including myself, see it as in large part a modification of the NPT, which also requires a 2/3 Senate vote.

It is important to remember that the Corker-Cardin bill did not amend the Constitution and cannot be used to circumvent the Senate’s responsibility to approve by a 2/3 vote any treaty or amendment to a treaty. At the time of the consideration of the Corker-Cardin bill, the contents of the Iran document were unknown. Members of Congress believed that a final agreement would be consistent with the NPT. The bill did not anticipate reviewing a draft treaty. The word “treaty” does not appear in the bill. It is a lawful means of reviewing an executive order or agreement; it is not a lawful means of reviewing a draft treaty.

Moreover, the Corker-Cardin bill says that the President shall provide: “a certification that the agreement meets U.S. non-proliferation objectives.” Yet, as I have explained elsewhere, the Iran document weakens and amends the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by exempting Iran from the specific requirements the Treaty imposes on non-nuclear countries. It is difficult to see how the exemption of Iran “meets U.S. non-proliferation objectives.”

Treaty ratification requires a 2/3 approval of the U.S. Senate. It is difficult by design, but is not, as Secretary Kerry testified before the House, “physically impossible.” Hundreds of treaties have been ratified over the years. The mere difficulty of ratifying the document signed with the government of Iran is not a basis to abrogate the U.S. Constitution and to avoid treating the document as a treaty.

The Constitution provides a mechanism for Constitutional amendments. Congress cannot by mere statute amend the Constitution. The Corker-Cardin review process specifically provides a mechanism for Congress to review an agreement, not a draft treaty. If the document signed by Secretary Kerry were even in part a draft treaty or draft treaty amendment, it could not become the law of the land by a backdoor circumvention of the Constitution.

4. Can the Next President Repudiate Obama's Iran Agreement? (The Atlantic)

Bruce Ackerman and David Golove, Sep 10, 2015

Since it’s clear that Congress won’t be rejecting the Iranian Nuclear Agreement, opponents are now trying to diminish its significance. Senator Marco Rubio, for example, now denies that the pact is “binding on the next administration,” and has pledged to repudiate it on his first day as president.

Rubio is wrong. If taken seriously, his position would destroy the binding character of America’s commitments to the IMF, the World Bank, NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization. The accords that undergird these institutions, like the Iran agreement, have their foundation in statutes authorizing the president to commit the nation. The Constitution makes these statutes the “supreme law of the land,” binding the country in the same manner as treaties approved by the Senate. The President can no more walk away from them than he can from any other law or treaty.

Congressionally authorized executive agreements have long served as the mainstay of American diplomacy. Since the Second World War, they have provided the basis for 90 percent of America’s international obligations.

Two factors have driven the dramatic ascendance of these agreements. Since only the Senate is involved in ratifying treaties, the House may balk when it is later asked to support the treaty with implementing legislation and funding—leaving the country in default of its legal obligations. In contrast, the statutory route requires a majority buy-in from both houses of Congress from the very beginning.

Treaty-making is also less democratic. California has a population equal to that of the 22 American states with the fewest inhabitants, yet it has only 2 senators and they have 44. Since ratification requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate, senators from sparsely populated states may readily veto presidential initiatives favored by the overwhelming majority of Americans. This deficit of democracy is diminished, though hardly eliminated, when a simple majority of the Senate joins the House in authorizing a diplomatic initiative.

The constitutional text, democratic principles, and entrenched practice overwhelmingly support the binding character of the Iran agreement. So does legislation that Congress adopted last May, which explicitly grants the Administration authority to negotiate and implement binding legal commitments with Iran.

Other provisions of the May legislation reinforce the high seriousness with which Congress has taken the president’s initiative. The statute, in setting down the procedural ground rules for negotiations, required the president to give the House and Senate roughly 60 days to reject the terms of any settlement he might reach with the Iranians.

This represents a sharp departure from standard practice. Generally speaking, Congress finds it too time-consuming to pass judgment on the individualized deals that the executive negotiates with foreign governments. It instead allows them to go into effect immediately so long as they comply with the rules set out in the authorizing statute. Congress insists on case-by-case review only on matters of fundamental importance—it singled out these negotiations for special attention precisely because they could create a long-term arrangement,  lasting 15 years, that  will govern the conduct of several presidents.

Congress singled out this accord for special attention precisely because it can last for 15 years and will govern the conduct of several presidents.

Now that Obama’s initiative seems to have survived this process of review, Rubio’s response should be seen for what it is: an unprecedented pledge to inaugurate his term by repudiating the constitutional command to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” There has already been too much lawlessness from the presidency since September 11th; Rubio’s celebratory anticipation of further illegalities represents a new low.

His loose rhetoric will also have broad-ranging implications, even if he fails to win the presidency. The Iran agreement isn’t the only hot-button negotiation approved by Congress. The administration is currently engaged in intensive efforts to win breakthrough Pacific Rim and European trade pacts, which are already slated for “fast-track” consideration by Congress.

The prospect of legislative review is already complicating negotiations, since foreign governments can’t be sure that the administration can can convince the House and Senate to approve a bargain that satisfies their key demands. Nevertheless, momentum is building for a real deal, at least for the Transpacific Partnership.

But there’s one caveat. Up to now, foreign governments have been assuming that if Congress says yes, their deal is legally binding. Yet if Rubio’s assault on congressionally authorized agreements gains ground, the entire diplomatic effort will likely come to a halt: America’s bargaining partners will refuse to alienate domestic supporters by making big concessions once they’re told that the next president can abandon the entire arrangement.

The Constitution is bigger than any particular partisan dispute. If other opponents of the Iranian or Transpacific agreements join Rubio in assaulting the current framework governing American diplomacy, all they will accomplish is the destruction of the country’s credibility—undermining the ability of the United States to serve as a leading architect of world order in the 21st century.