The Corker-Cardin act, passed in May, requires that the Iran deal be presented to Congress in its entirety and gives Congress a 30-day window in which to approve or disapprove it. Eugene Kontorovich argues that, until Congress has seen the “side-deals” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the executive branch has not fulfilled the terms of Corker-Cardin, and therefore cannot remove sanctions:

The only reason the president can waive sanctions is because Congress has authorized it. Corker-Cardin modifies and narrows that authorization by conditioning it on congressional review of the entire Iran deal. [In other words], it is delegating to him the power to waive sanctions, provided he allow for congressional review of the deal. . . . Since sanctions are fundamentally in Congress’s exclusive power, [as outlined in Article I of the Constitution], it can certainly narrow the scope of its delegation [of this power to the president] in this way. . . .

Indeed, it would raise massive [questions about Congress’s powers as described in] Article I if Congress cannot condition delegations of foreign commerce and tariff powers on executive actions that allow for meaningful congressional monitoring and review of the delegation and its ongoing wisdom. [Through the Corker-Cardin Act], Congress is not imposing conditions on the executive’s exercise of his powers, but on its exercise of its own powers.

Kontorovich argues that Congress could sue the president over this issue, and notes that “a credible legal challenge to the Iran deal has substantial value to opponents even absent a high chance of ultimate victory.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.