Even though President Obama has been able to push forward with policy making in his little remaining time in office, when it comes to the new nuclear deal with Iran, the president will most likely lose in a looming fight with a hostile Senate over the agreement, a political scientist at Georgia State University said.
Associate Professor Daniel P. Franklin, an expert on American chief executives, budgeting and the legislative process, said the deal is a classic example of how lame-duck presidents go about making policy.
Franklin is the author of “Pitiful Giants: Presidents in their Final Term” (Palgrave MacMillian, 2014) and “Politics and Film: Political Culture and Film in the United States” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), among other publications exploring political culture, executive powers and the relationships between the presidency and Congress.
“This is also an example of the limits of this type of policymaking,” Franklin said. “Without weighing in on the merits of the agreement itself, I predict the president will lose, and lose big.
Under the U.S. Constitution, treaties can only be entered with the approval of the Senate – a Senate controlled by the opposite party, and in which many senators have already condemned the agreement.
If the president pushes forward, the matter could make it to the judicial branch to determine the constitutionality of the agreement that the Obama Administration reached with Iran.
“There is no way that the Supreme Court will approve this as a non-binding agreement, not requiring the Advice and Consent of the Senate,” Franklin said. “That decision will be 9-0 in the Supreme Court, as this issue does not break along Democratic-Republican lines.
“And while this matter is held up in the courts, the Obama Administration will run out of time,” he explained. “This just isn’t going to happen.”
For more information about Franklin, visit http://politicalscience.gsu.edu/profile/daniel-p-franklin/.
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