Freshman Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been trying to undermine the Iran nuclear agreement from the get-go. Last year, Cotton wrote—and 46 other senators signed—a letter to Iran’s “supreme leader” and its president saying the deal would not be upheld after President Obama leaves office. Since then, he’s tried other gambits to keep the agreement from happening, or to wreck it after it was signed. These have all failed and now, we’re seeing his latest effort.
Wednesday Cotton failed to get the 60 votes needed for an energy and water appropriations bill amendment to bar the United States from making new purchases of heavy water from Iran under the nuclear agreement.
It wasn’t the first time Cotton’s effort in this matter has failed. Two Wednesdays ago, the senator’s attempt to get a vote on the amendment to the $37.5 billion appropriations bill—widely seen as a bipartisan effort that could loosen the logjam that has kept such measures from being passed on time in the past few years—caused the bill itself to be defeated when four Republicans joined all the Senate Democrats in shooting it down. The bill includes several national security programs, including the Department of Energy’s oversight of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Resistance to Cotton’s amendment subsequently blocked the bill two more times, including in a vote this past Monday.
As part of the Iran nuclear agreement, Tehran is required to dilute, sell, or dispose of most of its stockpile of heavy water. This is used to moderate some types of nuclear reactors, in the process of making nuclear weapons and for medical and other research. Cotton’s amendment would have blocked the Obama administration’s plan to purchase $8.6 million of heavy water—32 tons worth. The U.S. Department of Energy would store the heavy water at its Oakridge, Tennessee, facility and sell it to universities and other researchers.
Democrats have viewed the amendment all along as a “poison pill” designed to open the door to additional challenges to the Iran nuclear agreement. That pact was signed last summer and curtails Iran’s nuclear program—parts of it for more than 15 years—in order to keep that nation from building the nuclear bomb that critics say it wants and that Iran’s leaders say they have no interest in.
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee brokered the latest deal under which the Senate voted on the Cotton amendment. It required 60 votes to pass and fell short by 57-42:
But while the water spending measure was allowed to proceed, the dispute opened a fissure among Republicans who have been in lockstep on Iran policy since unanimously voting against the nuclear deal last year. Alexander said the amendment would have opened up the leftovers of Iran’s nuclear program to the open market — rather than bringing them to the U.S., where they can be put to peaceful purposes.
“I’m opposed to the Iran agreement,” Alexander said this week. “I’m also opposed to North Korea or other countries [being able to] buy heavy water that could be used to make plutonium or nuclear weapons. It raises a whole complex set of national security issues.”
This certainly won’t be the last effort to smash the Iran nuclear agreement. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker of Tennessee, who supported Cotton’s amendment, told Politico that he and other senators are developing “broader legislation to deal with Iran” that will be out “very soon.”