Could the fact that President Obama refused to submit his Iran agreement to the Senate for a standard up-or-down treaty vote turn around and, as my sergeant in the Army used to say, bite him in the gluteus maximus?
It turns out that could depend on Gov. Cuomo. New York is among the states that have enacted their own sanctions against Iran. The more Obama tries to give up to Iran, the more the state sanctions will start to irk the ayatollahs.
Which is precisely why the Obama administration is asking all states to get rid of such sanctions. On April 8, according to Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, the administration sent letters to that effect to the governors of all 50 states.
The letter, Lake reports, went out from a State Department aide, Stephen Mull, whose official title is Iran nuclear implementation coordinator. In plain language, he’s assistant secretary of state for appeasement.
“Some states have adopted laws designed to incentivize Iran to change its behavior in certain ways,” Lake quotes Mull as writing to the governor of Illinois. He asked the governor to consider whether Obama’s Iran deal addresses Illinois’ concerns.
The delicate wording — the wheedling tone — of the administration letter suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry knows he has no authority to demand that states retreat from their laws against the Iranian regime.
Obama might have had some standing to do that if he’d submitted the Iran deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty and sought enabling legislation. That would have made it what the Constitution calls the “supreme law of the land.”
The administration, though, shrank from seeking proper approval in Congress. It knew full well the agreement wouldn’t have come anywhere close to ratification by the required two-thirds of the upper chamber. In other words, if Obama had called it a treaty (it certainly looks and quacks like a treaty) it never would’ve made it out of the Senate.
Instead, it’s just some cheesy deal between Obama and the Iranian camarilla. It leaves the states perfectly free to tell Kerry to take a hike. Which is where Cuomo comes in for what will be an important test.
In 2012, New York passed its own Iran Divestment Act. It was signed with some fanfare by Cuomo in January 2012 and banned companies that invest in the Iranian energy sector from receiving state or local government contracts.
Then Cuomo signed an extension of the law, binding state and local public authorities, as well as SUNY and CUNY. He put out a strong statement about the signal New York was sending to the Iranian regime.
New York’s laws came two years after federal legislation passed the US Congress, which enacted its own sanctions against Iran in 2010. (That measure, incidentally, passed the House by a vote of 408 to eight and the Senate by 99 to zero.) In January, the administration started watering them down.
So Cuomo’s mettle is going to be tested in foreign affairs. How will he respond to the letter from the assistant secretary for appeasement? Will he truckle to the ayatollahs in pursuit of John Kerry’s peace deal?
If he does stand up for New York law, he could win at the Supreme Court. That, according to law professor Eugene Kontorovich, is because of a case — Medillen v. Texas — that came to a head during the presidency of George W. Bush.
At issue was whether Texas could execute a murderer and rapist it had convicted, even though it hadn’t notified the accused of consular rights vouchsafed by the so-called International Court of “Justice.” Bush went to the Supreme Court to try to make Texas buckle.
In a 6-3 decision that stunned the administration, the court ruled that even a treaty doesn’t necessarily bind the states — unless Congress has passed enabling legislation. Even the great liberal justice John Paul Stevens concurred.
At that point, the International Criminal Court ordered Texas to stay the execution. But the Texans stood on their rights under our federal system. The killer, Jose Ernesto Medillen, went to his doom in a Texas prison, while the United Nations’ court fumed.
If the Obama administration tries to force New York to join in appeasing Iran, could it become an issue in the presidential campaign? Here’s a hint. The lawyer who won the case for Texas at the Supreme Court was its solicitor general: Ted Cruz.