Corker’s Iran Deal complicity disqualifies him for sec. of state

President Elect Donald Trump’s firm opposition to the Iran Deal and commitment to unwind it would be gravely undermined by a secretary of state who played an essential role in its passage.

Today, the Republican most complicit in President Obama’s seminal foreign policy disaster is reportedly meeting with Mr. Trump as one of the final candidates being considered for the position.

His appointment ought to be strenuously resisted by all those who seek an American interest-oriented national security and foreign policy that breaks with the failed status quo of the last 15 years in general, and who are opposed to the aiding, abetting and enabling of the genocidal jihadist Iranian regime in particular.

Recall that it was Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn. (F, 45%) who as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee perversely sacrificed the Senate’s ability to reject the president’s Iran Deal by turning its treaty ratification power on its head.

As Andrew C. McCarthy explained in National Review at the time, the Corker bill was a constitutional perversion crafted to make it appear as if Republicans opposed the president’s policy while in actuality they endorsed it. McCarthy wrote:

And sail through Congress the Iran Deal did, thanks to Sen. Corker’s efforts.

Sen. Corker’s ruse is symbolic of the exact Republican Establishment chicanery that President-elect Trump’s supporters rejected.

And that he would employ such a strategy on an Iran Deal that effectively provides material support to the world’s leading state-sponsor of jihad represents the pinnacle of perfidy.

Its devastating effects have in fact extended beyond the Iran Deal, undermining the Senate’s advice and consent prerogative with respect to other international agreements.

As Jed Babbin explains in the Washington Times, President Obama has sought to evade the Senate by seeking approval of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at the United Nations Security Council.

The CTBT, which would create a legally binding prohibition on nuclear explosive tests by its signatories, was rejected by the Senate in 1999 because it lacked verification powers.

In order to bypass a Senate vote, the Obama State Department is seeking a Security Council resolution “that would provide that any U.S. nuclear test would defeat the ‘object and purpose’ of the CTBT.”

Sen. Corker reportedly challenged the State Department, claiming that it was subverting the Senate’s constitutional power over ratification of treaties, to which a National Security Council spokesman replied that President Obama was not asking for a “legally binding” resolution from the Security Council.

Babbin wrote:

Sen. Corker has proven himself to be unfit for the job of secretary of state because of his complicity in the Iran Deal, and broader undermining of constitutional checks and balances.

The State Department, which has been a progressive bastion for decades, requires a leader with the backbone, judgment and skill to deftly navigate a hornet’s nest of a bureaucracy likely to oppose a national interest-oriented foreign policy at every turn. It cannot fall to a member of the Republican establishment in good standing who supports the very policies the president elect most ardently opposes.