With this embarrassing history recounted, congressional Republicans’ apparently muted response to news of Biden’s impending deal may make more sense than it would seem to at first glance: Russia’s integral role should make a bad Iran deal even harder for Biden to defend as a matter of politics, but attacking it would require GOP lawmakers to dredge up their role in getting us to this point. The aforementioned letter by 33 Republican touts the treaty clause while avoiding discussion of how Republicans helped Obama and Biden navigate around it the last time. And both that letter and the McCarthy–McCaul letter remind the Biden administration of INARA’s disclosure obligations, without recounting that INARA was responsible for undermining treaty-clause opposition to the JCPOA, and that it proved utterly ineffective in forcing the Obama administration to fully disclose the deal to Congress.

Hopefully, Republicans will get properly angry about Biden’s deal before it’s too late. But you may have your answer if you’re wondering why there’s not a full-scale mutiny on Capitol Hill over Biden’s unabashed collusion with our Russian adversary — even as it is ravaging Ukraine — in order to complete a deal that empowers and enriches our Iranian adversary.

While out of one side of the Biden administration’s mouth it promises a sanctions crackdown that will reduce Russia to international-pariah status, out of the other side it speaks about continuing our strategic cooperation with Russia in areas of “shared interest” — which, it laughably contends, include making sure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons, an aim that Biden’s deal would not achieve and that there’s no reason to believe Moscow is committed to achieving. Meantime, while Biden continues to hamstring American fossil-fuel production in order to mollify his party’s woke-progressive base, he simultaneously pleads with every rogue regime under the sun to step up production with oil prices now skyrocketing above $120 per barrel. So to Iran and Russia, we can now add Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Libya.