Even if Congress were to nix the doomsday deal Obama made with the evil rulers of Iran, Obama could ignore the people’s representatives and continue to help the mullahs become a nuclear armed power hostile to America.

The Associated Press reports:

The September vote on the Iran nuclear deal is billed as a titanic standoff between President Barack Obama and Congress. Yet even if U.S. lawmakers reject the agreement, it’s not game-over for the White House.

A congressional vote of disapproval would not prevent Obama from acting on his own to start putting the accord in place. While he probably would take some heavy criticism, this course would let him add the foreign policy breakthrough to his second-term list of accomplishments.

Obama doesn’t need a congressional OK to give Iran most of the billions of dollars in relief from economic sanctions that it would get under the agreement, as long as Tehran honors its commitments to curb its nuclear program. …

What commitments would those be? Are there any?

With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, the House and Senate are expected to turn down the deal.

Obama has pledged to veto such a resolution of disapproval, so the question has turned to whether Congress could muster the votes to override him. And Obama would forfeit the authority he now enjoys to waive sanctions that Congress has imposed.

But Democrats and Republicans have predicted that his expected veto will be sustained — that opponents lack the votes to one-up Obama. More than half of the Senate Democrats and Independents of the 34 needed to sustain a veto are backing the deal. There is one notable defection so far — New York’s Chuck Schumer, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate and the party leader-in-waiting.

In the House, more than 45 Democrats have expressed support and 10 their opposition.

The president could suspend some U.S. sanctions. He could issue new orders to permit financial transactions that otherwise are banned now. On the financial sector, Obama could use executive orders to remove certain Iranians and entities, including nearly two dozen Iranian banks, from U.S. lists, meaning they no longer would be subject to economic penalties.

Only Congress can terminate legislative sanctions, and they’re some of the toughest, aimed at Iran’s energy sector, its central bank and essential parts of its economy. Still, experts say Obama, on his own, can neutralize some of those sanctions and work with the Europeans on softening others.

The September votes won’t be the final word.

One looming question is whether Congress should try to reauthorize the Iran Sanctions Act, which authorizes many of the congressional sanctions. Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, have introduced legislation to renew it.

Iran could interpret a U.S. move to reauthorize the law as a breach of the nuclear agreement. Administration officials won’t say whether it is or isn’t, only that it’s premature to address it.

Should Congress push for a different deal? The administration says renegotiating the agreement is a nonstarter. …

[But] Schumer and other opponents think the Obama administration should go back to the bargaining table. In the past, Congress has rejected outright or demanded changes to more than 200 treaties and international agreements.

The only way America can save itself is by electing a president who will tear up the deal. But by then a lot of harm will have been done.

Referring to the Associated Press report, John Hinderaker at PowerLine comments:

That is correct. The president has the constitutional authority to enter into an executive agreement. Which is where debate over the Iran deal began, with an open letter to Iran’s leaders that was signed by 47 Republican senators and posted on Senator Tom Cotton’s web site. The letter explained that the Iran agreement was not being submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Therefore, as a mere executive agreement, it could be canceled with a stroke of the pen by America’s next president:

First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them. In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote. A so-called congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate (which, because of procedural rules, effectively means a three-fifths vote in the Senate). Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement. …

What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.

Tom Cotton’s letter was viciously attacked by liberals, but what it said was obviously correct. Now, with majorities in both houses of Congress opposed to the deal, the Associated Press tells us it can still proceed as an executive agreement. Of course it can. And the next president, who will probably be a Republican, can revoke it; and this Congress, or a subsequent one, can pass legislation inconsistent with it. That’s what happens when you don’t have the votes to ratify a treaty.

Even with the best scenario – a future president tearing up the treaty – the Iranians will have got even closer to building their nuclear arsenal.

If they haven’t started building it already. Which they probably have.

If Obama wants this deal to be a big part of his “legacy”, why can’t he understand that to a very great number of people – most of the Western world very possibly – it will be an abominable legacy? That he will be classed among the most destructive and evil leaders in history? Has that thought even occurred to him? And if it has, has he dismissed it as impossible? Is his arrogance that extreme?

Probably, yes. Hatred of America and love of Islam seem to be ruling passions of his life.

The big threat hanging over the human race and Western civilization is Islam (not “climate change”).

Is it possible that the threat was totally ignored at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)?

Robert Spencer,  one of the best exponents and opponents of Islamic ideology, was shut out of the event.

So was the most urgent issue of the time totally ignored?

Fortunately not totally. We quote a National Review report:

Freshman Arkansas congressman Tom Cotton, a rising GOP star and an Iraq War veteran, criticized today the idea that the U.S. is fighting a “war against terror.”

“We’re fighting one war and it’s a war against radical Islamic jihad,” Cotton said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s not a war against terror alone. Terror is a technique or a tactic . . . It’s a war against specific people, radical Islamic jihadists, who are trying to using terror to defeat the United States.

“Iraq and Afghanistan, as much as we might see those as distinct, are just two battle fronts in that war,” added Cotton, a former Army officer. …

Obama [he said] thought the United States was involved in a “law-enforcement campaign,” not a war.

He brought up the case of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s recently captured son-in-law.

“Did we send him to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, and ultimately, for a military trial? No. We read him his Miranda rights, and we sent him to federal district courts in New York City.

“The president … is returning us [to] a law-enforcement construct, the kind that prevailed in the 1990s before the 9/11 attacks.”

Yes, because Obama, who is pro-Islam, wants us to believe that there is no war being waged against us: that 9/11 was a crime rather than the act of jihad which it was. He also wants us to believe that al-Qaeda – the piece of Islam that perpetrated the attack and which he is prepared to pursue for reasons of political expediency – has been almost defeated by the killing of Osama bin Laden and other of its leaders. He would have us believe that al-Qaeda alone was the threat, and the rest of Islam is no danger to us at all.

The truth is that the cohorts of al-Qaeda are more numerous than ever; that it is much stronger than it was in 2001, and is the foremost fighting force of Islam. It was behind the attack in Benghazi – a fact the Obama and his henchmen do not want known, which is no doubt the main reason why they refused to send military aid to the ambassador and soldiers at the mission; why they pretended that the violence was an outburst of spontaneous civilian indignation over some video no one in Libya had even seen; and why they persist in playing down the rout as an event of very little importance. (“What difference does it make at this point?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked some months after the attack occurred.)

Tom Cotton was right to raise the subject at CPAC, but he understated the threat. The war is not being waged only by “radical Islamic jihadists” but by Islam as such, and not only by violent means but by infiltration and subversion.

That is what Robert Spencer would have been able to explain to the Conference if he had not been excluded by pro-Islamic members of the organization – chiefly Grover Norquist and his close Muslim associate Suhail Khan.      

At his website Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer himself writes that he’s glad Tom Cotton “enunciated these truths”; but he points out that at the same time –

Cotton endorses the misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite their manifest failure. How much American blood and treasure does he expect the U.S. to commit to the futile effort to bring “democracy” to those countries?

The West will not win the war with Islam on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not now. While every new violent act should be punished with violence – with drone attacks, with the capture and execution of jihadis whenever possible – the war will ultimately only be won by defeating the ideology itself. That means the religion of Islam must be subjected to criticism. It must be attacked and destroyed by words. By argument, by contempt, by mockery.

Muslims know that words are the greatest danger to the survival of their religion; that criticism is the strongest defense against their war of conquest – which is precisely why they are doing their utmost to make such criticism a crime.

Islam must become as universally scorned as Nazism, which it closely resembles.