Democrats Are Pouring It On As Top Foreign Affairs Dem Releases Must Read Support for Iran Deal

By: Sarah Jones
Thursday, September, 3rd, 2015, 10:58 am

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is piling up the pledges of support for the Iran Deal in the House. She didn’t even take a breath after the Senate locked in the 34th vote which gives Democrats the ability to sustain a Presidential veto should it become necessary. Pelsoi doesn’t work like that. She is a careful, thorough, and dedicated champion for causes and policies in which she has great faith. So the pledges keep rolling in from the House.

Thursday morning, Representative Brian Higgins (D-NY) issued his pledge of support, writing, “This agreement will do more than any plausible alternative to accomplish America’s objective of blocking Iran’s pathway to a bomb in a way that we can verify. For this reason I will vote to support the JCPOA when the question comes before the House.”

As a member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa and the Ranking Member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, his statement is particularly nuanced and insightful. It’s really something everyone should read in order to understand the tradeoffs of the deal and to judge the criticism from an informed position.

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“Ten years ago the United States led a global effort to place economic sanctions on Iran in response to its pursuit of a nuclear weapon. These sanctions devastated Iran’s economy and forced it to the negotiating table. But they did little, if anything, to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Today Iran is a nuclear-threshold state, with a “breakout time” (how long it would take for Iran to build a nuclear bomb if it decided to) of just two to three months.