COMMENTARY
by Rick Richman
September 16, 2015

Last week, in announcing his decision to vote against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Democratic Representative Ted W. Lieu of California issued a 23-page, single-spaced statement, complete with 79 footnotes, which reached the conclusion set forth in the title of this post. The statement is, in my view, the definitive analysis of the Iran deal – written in an extraordinarily thoughtful manner by a liberal first-term Member of Congress, who was elected president of the 20-member Democratic Freshman Class. It is the document future historians will cite to show that the likely consequences of the deal were apparent to a bipartisan majority and ignored by a partisan minority: in Representative Lieu’s words, the deal gives Iran “a legal path to a vast nuclear infrastructure and lifts two crucial arms control provisions, the arms embargo and the ballistic missile ban,” which “exposes America to a grave, potentially existential threat” because those missiles will be pointed at us. READ MORE