The Iranian nuclear deal contains the "seeds of its own undoing" by the next occupant of the White House, according to law school professor and former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.
The University of California Berkeley School of Law professor, in a
Monday podcast for The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, said the Iran nonproliferation agreement "skirts" the line between a treaty and an executive order.
"When you look at this agreement — and I think this is why they did it this way – … the Obama administration is just trying to skirt the outer boundaries of what is a treaty," he said.
But, he points out, the mandated congressional review and vote on the deal — though it may not work out the way Republican lawmakers had hoped — still leaves the next president the option of nixing the pact, he said.
"The Congress voting on this deal and voting against the deal, which it will in both Houses, actually demonstrates to the world — to the P5+1 and to Iran — that this deal does not have the 100 percent support of the United States," he said.
"In fact the president alone is making this deal, and when the next president comes in … it's very possible that he will reverse it…"
"The entire world is waiting to see what Congress does because they know that Congress doesn't support this deal," he added. "So the notion somehow that the [United States] would be bound, it would be so much harder to reverse it because we've gotten [a United Nations] resolution, I completely reject that."
Yoo also rapped Republican lawmakers last week
on Newsmax TV, charging they gave too much power away in passing Sen. Bob Corker's bill in April that requires the deal to come back to Congress for a two-month review and vote.
"Under the Constitution, you're not supposed to be able to make a treaty unless two-thirds of the Senate agrees to the agreement. What's happened is that the Republicans reversed the whole process," Yoo said last Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"They turned the Constitution upside down and they said, now, we're going to preapprove the deal before we even see it … and we can vote to disapprove it, whatever that means, and then the president's able to veto that."
"So in the end, you can't stop a treaty here unless you've got two-thirds of the House and the Senate vote against is, whereas before under the Constitution, you used to need two-thirds to get an agreement made. So the Republicans only have themselves to blame," he added.
On Monday's podcast, Yoo noted the congressional review is "very valuable to put everybody on the record," and "does delay immediate implementation of the agreement."
"The price for that," he said, is that the agreement now becomes a legal question as to whether it is a treaty or a executive agreement.
"I actually happen to believe that the president could terminate a treaty as well as an executive agreement without congressional participation – so the next president could terminate this either way."
Yoo also made the point about the next president's power to scotch the Iran deal in a July 26 commentary for
National Review Online.
"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," he wrote.
"Obama-administration officials argue that the agreement need not take the treaty form because it is not legally binding under international law," he wrote. "Its only significant promise is that [President Barack] 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, he wrote, "the president who occupies the Oval Office in January 2017 can undo the deal with little delay."
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