S. 1881

A commenter at R.P. Wolff's blog, C. Rossi, has a good comment on S.1881, the so-called Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act:

The legislation (S 1881) ... imposing addition[al] sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran is daylight madness. The bill would require the President to certify that Iran has met certain requirements of the bill, many of which the President could not determine much less certify. It would require Iran to forswear control over any of its nuclear activities, peaceful or otherwise. Worst of all, the Congress, which has cowardly given up its war powers to the Executive, would by this bill further cede these powers to Binyamin Netanyahu by requiring the US to provide “economic, military, and diplomatic” support to Israel if it chooses to wage war against Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is a good technical analysis of the bill by Edward Levine of The Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation (http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/iran/articles/analysis_of_faults_in_the_menendez-kirk_iran_sanctions_bill_s_1881/). Also, a trenchant criticism in the NY Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/20/iran-good-deal-now-danger/).  The bill is a priority of AIPAC, and the Democratic cosponsors tend to be clustered in the Northeast (NY, CT, PA, NJ, DE, and MD), that is, areas where AIPAC can still exert some direct effect on wayward legislators....

Cardin of Md. is a cosponsor. (Not too surprising. Still, as a constituent I suppose I should write him a note of protest.)