In July, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) posted a statement to her congressional website indicating she would take 60 days to carefully study and review President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. She clearly didn’t like what she saw.
"There are strong arguments for and against the agreement but, as a matter of conscience, I have decided to oppose it," Maloney said in a statement to the News.
Maloney said she is "concerned that, even if Iran complies with the restraints spelled out throughout the life of the agreement, the deal does not block Iran from eventually acquiring nuclear weapons."
Maloney is now one of 14 House Democrats to announce opposition to the deal. This, despite Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s best efforts to lasso supporters.
One of Maloney’s fellow New Yorkers, Sen. Chuck Schumer, is also not a fan of the Obama administration’s rushed nuclear agreement. He made that quite clear in a lengthy and detailed piece on Medium.com:
In the first ten years of the deal, there are serious weaknesses in the agreement. First, inspections are not “anywhere, anytime”; the 24-day delay before we can inspect is troubling. While inspectors would likely be able to detect radioactive isotopes at a site after 24 days, that delay would enable Iran to escape detection of any illicit building and improving of possible military dimensions (PMD) — the tools that go into building a bomb but don’t emit radioactivity.
As more information becomes available, more legislators seem to be defecting. One of the biggest bombshells came last week, when the Associated Press confirmed that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency agreed to allow Iran to inspect itself at a nuclear site allegedly used to develop nuclear weapons.
These revelations are unlikely to halt the dangerous deal from becoming reality, however. It appears to have the necessary votes and should Republicans pass a disapproval measure, the president has promised to defeat it with a veto. New reports show it may be even easier than that.
The silver lining for opponents is the fact that several GOP presidential candidates have indicated they would throw out the deal on day one.