WASHINGTON -- Republicans said Thursday that President Barack Obama's administration was fleeced in the nuclear deal with Iran, as Secretary of State John Kerry retorted that critics were imagining a "unicorn arrangement involving Iran's complete capitulation."
The strong words on both sides reflected the high stakes as three members of Obama's Cabinet appeared Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
It was the first public testimony under Congress' 60-day review of the agreement reached last week between Iran and world powers to remove some economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limiting its nuclear program.
Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the committee's chairman, has promised to be an "honest broker" as lawmakers decide whether to vote for the accord. But he was sharp in his criticism Thursday.
"We've been through an incredible journey that began 20 months ago" when Iran "was a rogue nation that had a boot on its neck," Corker said. "Our goal was to dismantle their [nuclear] program."
Instead, he said, "the deal on the table basically codifies the industrialization of their nuclear program. An amazing transition has occurred."
"I believe you've been fleeced," Corker told Kerry.
Obama has said the agreement blocks all four Iranian "pathways" to the development of nuclear weapons through enriched uranium or plutonium, provides "unprecedented" monitoring and verification of all Iranian nuclear activities, and has robust mechanisms to "snap back" sanctions if Iran violates its provisions.
Both Obama and Kerry have criticized opposition charges as inaccurately portraying the facts of the deal, along with an unrealistic description of what was possible to obtain in a negotiation in which the United States was part of a team of global powers.
Kerry on Thursday spurned the Republican argument that the economic pressure of continued sanctions would get Iran back to the bargaining table. If Congress blocked the accord, he said, Iran would rush forward with its nuclear program and international sanctions would collapse.
"The alternative to the deal that we have reached is not what I've seen some ads on TV suggesting disingenuously," Kerry said. "It isn't a, quote, better deal, some sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran's complete capitulation. That is a fantasy, plain and simple, and our intelligence community will tell you that."
In a mirror of Kerry's political offensive, Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, faced down hard-liners in his own country questioning the deal, saying it was a "valuable" step for his country by easing international sanctions and reopening Iran's struggling economy.
"This is a new page in history," Rouhani said in a nationally broadcast speech.
Israel has blasted the nuclear deal. One of that nation's main supporters in the U.S., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, formed a nonprofit group called Citizens for a Nuclear-Free Iran, which plans a multimillion-dollar national TV and digital campaign against the agreement.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told the Cabinet officials that after reviewing the agreement, he concluded it "produces a dramatically better position for about 15 years than the status quo before negotiations started."
House Democrats were lobbied to support the accord Thursday, as a dozen of them met with Obama at the White House and some received a private briefing at the Capitol from Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist who helped negotiate the accord.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said it was the third Kerry briefing or hearing he'd heard in two days and that the message had been consistent. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said there was "a benefit to the cumulative effort."
"Every time, they have a definite and consistent answer" to questions, Welch said of Kerry and Moniz. "There's an answer, and it's detailed. And I'm seeing members feeling just a little bit more secure because of that."
In the Senate committee, Kerry testified alongside Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, whose department oversees economic sanctions against Iran that would be eased in return for curbs on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.
"If Iran violates the commitments once we suspended the sanctions, we will be able to promptly snap back both U.S. and [United Nations] sanctions," Lew told the committee. He said "powerful sanctions," including the primary U.S. trade embargo on Iran, will stay in place in any case.
Moniz vouched for the deal as "based in science and analysis."
That held little sway with Republican opponents such as Sen. James Risch of Idaho, who said the administration had been "bamboozled," or Corker, who likened the inspection protocol for Iran to asking professional athletes to put "their own urine samples in the mail and asking us to believe it is them."
Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Republican presidential candidate, said the "next president is under no legal or moral obligation to live up to" the deal, which he described as "terrible."
"It could go away the day Obama leaves office," Rubio said.
"I don't think any president would do that," Kerry responded.
Corker helped engineer the legislation giving Congress a 60-day review, followed by an opportunity to vote on the agreement. Republicans and Democrats critical of the accord probably have enough votes for a resolution to reject the deal, which Obama has said he would veto.
But overriding that action would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers, a threshold that's possible to meet only if 13 Senate Democrats and 44 House Democrats join all Republicans in voting against the president.
Referring to that difficult math for critics of the deal, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said the congressional review was a "big charade."
After the briefing for House Democrats, Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois said she felt "very confident that we're going to have enough votes" to sustain a veto.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Thursday that a vote, which he expected to come in September after the congressional summer recess, remains "the best shot" at blocking the Iran deal.
He added, without elaboration, "There's a lot of tools at our disposal."
Kerry is scheduled to take his campaign to sell the Iran accord to New York today, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations and meeting privately with leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the American Jewish Committee.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicole Gaouette, Kathleen Miller, Billy House, Kasia Klimasinska and Rachel Adams-Heard of Bloomberg News and by Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post.
A Section on 07/24/2015