John Shinkle/POLITICO Republican lawmakers threaten to kill Iran deal Obama will need to rally at least 34 senators to his defense as Congress reviews final agreement.

It will be days before Congress receives the full nuclear agreement with Iran and all of its classified annexes for review, but hawkish GOP lawmakers immediately began picking apart the final deal reached early Tuesday as “dangerous” and a “possible death sentence for Israel.”

Congressional Republicans have been warning President Barack Obama against a deal with Tehran for months, telling him to simply walk away as the negotiations dragged on past initial deadlines. But in the wee hours Tuesday, the administration announced a final deal to scale back Iran’s nuclear program and ease strict economic sanctions, so GOP critics’ job has shifted to building support in Congress to scuttle the deal by blocking Obama’s ability to lift those sanctions.


“You’ve created a possible death sentence for Israel,” fumed Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “This is the most dangerous, irresponsible step I’ve ever seen in the history of watching the Mideast.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — who got a call from Obama on Monday night that an Iran deal was “imminent” — accused the president of not keeping his word on dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and holding sanctions to Iran until international investigators verified that the country’s leadership is holding up its end of the bargain. Boehner said Obama “has abandoned his own goals.”

“What I know of it thus far is unacceptable,” Boehner told reporters. “It’s going to hand a dangerous regime billions of dollars in sanctions relief while paving the way for a nuclear Iran.”

“If it is in fact as bad a deal as I think it is at this moment, we’re going to do everything we can to stop it,” Boehner added.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) also reiterated the GOP hardline on the Iran agreement. “We will fight hard to reject this deal with every tool that we have,” vowed Scalise.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said the deal appeared to further the administration’s “flawed” approach and said Congress’s job is now to “weigh why a nuclear agreement should result in reduced pressure on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror.”

The GOP-led Congress plans to review the deal for two months before voting on whether to lift sanctions sometime in September, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters on Monday night. Obama will need to rally at least 34 senators to his defense to blow up a veto-proof majority, and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) is already predicting that Obama will struggle to do so.

“The American people are going to repudiate this deal, and I believe Congress will kill the deal,” Cotton said on Morning Joe.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said that he anticipated that Congress would at the very least withhold majority support for the deal, if not vote to block it altogether.

“Failure by the president to obtain congressional support will tell the Iranians and the world that this is Barack Obama’s deal, not an agreement with lasting support from the United States,” said Rubio, who has vowed to scuttle the deal if he becomes president.

Of course, most Republicans were already likely to oppose any deal. And though the party has large majorities on Capitol Hill, the GOP will need to persuade Democrats to buck the president.

Obama kicked off his latest sales job on Tuesday morning, vowing in a statement from the White House to veto any legislation that would threaten the deal.

With Vice President Joe Biden at his side, Obama said he welcomed a “robust debate” in Congress but urged lawmakers to think of the alternative to the deal negotiators struck — a greater chance of more war in the Middle East.

“We give nothing up by testing whether or not this problem can be solved peacefully,” Obama said.

In the first hours after the deal’s announcement, Democrats pledged to delve deeply into the deal’s details and warned they won’t support an agreement that strengthens Iran’s hand.

Among the lines in the sand Democrats have drawn: Keeping Iran from receiving immediate sanctions relief, allowing intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities and preventing Tehran from exporting weapons that could be used to further destabilize the Middle East.

“I will only support it if this deal prevents every Iranian pathway to develop a nuclear weapons capability,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of Corker’s committee, on Tuesday morning.

“It is in America’s national security interest that Iran is blocked from ever having a nuclear weapon,” said Foreign Relations ranking member Ben Cardin (D-Md.). “There is no trust when it comes to Iran.”

The central focus of the GOP’s lobbying effort will be members like Coons and Cardin, viewed as the swing senators who will be the key to blocking a deal or backing up the president. Two other crucial Democrats, Senate Democratic leader-in-waiting Chuck Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, scrapped a press conference on Puerto Rico, with the press likely to instead deluge them with questions about the Iran deal.

Corker will likely begin a series of hearings probing the deal later this July before Congress heads home for a lengthy summer recess. Corker has been warning against the direction that negotiations were tilting in Vienna, but has also been conciliatory to the administration by not signing onto Cotton’s letter to Iranian leadership.

On Tuesday morning Corker said he starts from a place of “deep skepticism,” one of the more charitable Republican sentiments toward Obama’s negotiating acumen. His counterpart across the Capitol, House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), called it a “tough sell.”

“Iran won’t even have to cheat on this agreement to be a small step away from the bomb, dominate the region and boost its oppressive regime at home,” said Royce, who met with Corker on Monday evening to plot a review strategy for Republicans. “Iran’s regime is now claiming to be a winner.”

But the president received a booster shot from top Democratic leaders in the Capitol. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — who heard from Obama on Monday night that a deal was coming shortly — dubbed the agreement an “historic accord” and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who also spoke with Obama by phone Monday night about the negotiations, praised Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for clinching a “historic deal.”

Lauren French and John Bresnahan contributed to this report.