Sen. Corker facing resistance for post
WASHINGTON – The infighting among President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers over whether Mitt Romney or Rudolph Giuliani should be the next secretary of state may be getting the most media attention, but Sen. Bob Corker is facing some resistance of his own.
Just a few hours before Corker sat down with Trump for a meeting at his posh offices in New York City last Tuesday, a couple of prominent conservatives implored the president-elect not to choose the Tennessee senator as his secretary of state. “We can do a lot better than this,” Mark Levin, editor-in-chief of the Conservative Review, said on his radio show Monday night. “If in fact Corker is chosen, it would be the worst presidential pick by a Republican in my lifetime. Absolutely the worst in such a position. It would be a disgrace.”
The next day, writer Benjamin Weingarten penned a Conservative Review piece that said Corker’s “complicity” in the Iran nuclear deal disqualifies him from becoming the nation’s top diplomat.
“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,” Weingarten wrote.
Levin, Weingarten and some other conservatives blame Corker for the Senate’s failure to block the Iran nuclear agreement, which requires Tehran to dismantle key elements of its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions that have crippled its economy.
The deal, announced last year, was negotiated with Iran by President Barack Obama’s administration and other Western powers.
Corker opposed the deal and, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was one of the key authors of bipartisan legislation that allowed the Senate to weigh in on the agreement. That legislation is the source of some conservative leaders’ wrath against the Tennessee Republican. The nuclear agreement, they also argue, should have been handled as a treaty, which would have required two-thirds of the Senate, or 67 senators, to vote to ratify the deal before it could go forward.
Under Corker's bill, the Senate voted on whether to “disapprove” the agreement instead of approve it. To “disapprove” the deal, the Senate needed just 60 votes, enough to end a filibuster by Democrats. In the end, the motion to disapprove the agreement got 58 votes – two shy of what was needed – essentially enabling the deal to move forward.
Critics say Corker should have made the vote about approval. That scenario would have put the onus on Obama to find the 67 votes needed for the agreement to advance.
Corker and his aides take exception to the claim that he allowed the nuclear deal to get through Congress. They point out what they see as a major hole in his critics’ argument:
The White House, not the Senate, decides whether such an agreement is a treaty. And the Obama administration made it clear from the beginning of the negotiations that it never intended to refer to the Iran deal as a treaty, meaning it would not be subject to the two-thirds vote in the Senate.
“Our bill was the only way to guarantee a role for Congress,” Corker said. “It forced the details of the agreement to be revealed, and while in the end there were not enough votes to stop the deal, it demonstrated a broad bipartisan majority opposed implementation.”