[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 5]
[House]
[Pages 7288-7289]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                                  IRAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. McClintock) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, a large and respected Iranian expatriate 
community has settled in California, and it has been my privilege to 
get to know some of them in recent years. They are part of an 
international diaspora of 5 million people who fled Iran after it fell 
to Islamic fascism 36 years ago. The stories they tell are 
bloodcurdling.
  One woman told of her cousin who had been rounded up in an 
antigovernment demonstration and taken to prison. After several years, 
the families were informed that their loved ones were to be released in 
the town square. When the excited families arrived for their long-
awaited reunion, their sons were hanged before their eyes.
  A doctor told me of his college days in Paris. He called home to tell 
his brother in Tehran of an anti-Khomeini demonstration. His brother 
was promptly arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for simply listening.
  Now, a few months ago, after many years of silence, the brother in 
America received a call from his brother in Iran who wanted to tell him 
of the simmering unrest going on throughout that country. The American 
brother told him to shut up, to remember what happened the last time 
they had spoken so candidly. His brother in Tehran said: ``I don't care 
anymore. They can't arrest all of us.''
  All of the Iranian expatriates I spoke with tell me the same thing: 
the economic sanctions and international isolation of the regime were 
bringing Iran to the brink of revolution.

[[Page 7289]]

  And this brings us to the President's negotiation with Iran's fascist 
Islamic regime. Any agreement between Iran's leaders and the United 
States is meaningless because Iran's leaders' word is meaningless. 
Iran's government is a notoriously untrustworthy rogue state that has 
made it unmistakably clear that it intends to acquire nuclear weapons 
and, once acquired, to use them. The only way to avert this nightmare, 
short of war, is for the regime to collapse from within.
  Over the last several years, the Iranian opposition has grown 
dramatically for two reasons: there is a strong and growing perception 
among the Iranian people that the Iranian dictatorship is a pariah in 
the international community, and the resulting international economic 
sanctions have created conditions that make the regime's overthrow 
imperative.
  At precisely this moment in history, Barack Obama did incalculable 
damage by initiating these negotiations. By engaging this rogue state, 
President Obama has given it international recognition and legitimacy 
at just that moment when it had lost legitimacy in the eyes of its own 
people. Worse, by promising relief from economic sanctions, he has 
removed the most compelling reason the organized Iranian resistance had 
to justify the regime's overthrow.
  It is not the outcome of the negotiations that matters because any 
agreement with Iran's conniving leaders is meaningless. It is the 
negotiations, themselves, that have greatly strengthened the regime, 
just when it was most vulnerable from growing opposition among its own 
people.
  Now, the House just passed H.R. 1191 that purports to restore 
congressional oversight to these talks. I believe it completely missed 
the point.
  First, our Constitution requires that any treaty be approved by two-
thirds of the Senate. Well, that wasn't going to happen, so Mr. Obama 
simply redefined the prospective treaty as an agreement between 
leaders, an agreement with no force of law and no legal standing.
  I fear the Congress has just changed this equation by establishing a 
wholly extra-constitutional process that lends the imprimatur of 
Congress to these negotiations with no practical way to stop the 
lifting of sanctions. Instead of two-thirds of the Senate having to 
approve a treaty, as the Constitution requires, this agreement takes 
effect automatically unless two-thirds of both Houses reject it--a 
complete sham.
  But worse, I fear this bill gives tacit approval to extremely harmful 
negotiations that Congress, instead, ought to vigorously condemn and 
unambiguously repudiate.
  We can only hope that in the days ahead what Churchill called ``the 
parliamentary democracies'' will regain the national leadership 
required to prevent these negotiations from producing what amounts to 
the Munich accords for the Middle East. That will require treating the 
Iranian dictatorship as the international pariah that it is, and it 
will require providing every ounce of moral and material support to the 
Iranian opposition that they need to rid their Nation of this fascist 
Islamic dictatorship, to restore their proud heritage, and to retake 
their place among the civilized nations of the world.

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