535 Secretaries of State

Aaron Stein 0:02

Cover your booty tight move. Cover your puss.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:15

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the foggy bit of California.

Aaron 0:31

And I'm Aaron Stein. I'm a contributor to the blog. I'm also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London and a doctoral fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Jeffrey 0:41

A bill to have both houses of Congress vote on any deal between Iran and the E3 EU plus three to limit Tehran's nuclear program is winding its way through the United States Senate. Some people are worried that the measure or even just the freak show that is debate within the self-proclaimed world's greatest deliberative body will kill off negotiations.

What do you think, Aaron?

Aaron 1:02

Well, I think freak show is a good way to describe it. I mean it's been a crazy ride, but let's start at the beginning. What does this bill do?

Jeffrey 1:09

Yeah, I think people maybe don't necessarily understand the nature of the agreement. So the core part of the Iran nuclear deal is that the president will – Remove sanctions on Iran, right? It sanctions relief in exchange for limits on their program. And it turns out that all of the sanctions that have been imposed by Congress have waiver authority that the president can use.

And so what the bill really does is it limits the ability of the president to use the waiver authority that Congress gave him during a period when Congress has a chance to review any agreement. And so the way it's set up Is the president has to submit any agreement to Congress within five days. And there is a 30-day period where Congress gets to review it during which the president cannot provide sanctions relief.

If Congress votes for it or does nothing, then the agreement goes through. If they vote to disapprove the agreement – Then the president has – I think it's 10 days to veto the agreement, and then Congress has 12 days to consider overriding the veto. Actually, I need to double-check that now.

Aaron 2:26

I think you have it backwards. I think it's 12 days to decide whether or not to veto, and then Congress has 10 days to figure out whether or not they want to try and override the veto.

Jeffrey 2:35

That's actually my memory too, and I'm staring at my notes, and it says the opposite, and I think I wrote it down wrong in my notes. Yeah.

Aaron 2:42

Well, my note says 12 and 10. But in any case, it's 22 days in which this balance of whether or not the president will veto it and then Congress will try and override the veto will take place.

Jeffrey 2:58

And there's one special case, which is if the deal is submitted around the summer recess, instead of 30 days, it's 60 days. Because, you know, God forbid, they should have to come back to work.

Aaron 3:12

I know. It's not as if our negotiators have been working overtime. But Congress needs to take their summer recess. But, you know, there's two schools of thought about this. Some people say this bill is not so bad because it only means that the president will have to peel away 34 so that the Senate will not have a veto-proof majority in order to get what he ultimately wants, which would be a pathway to sanctions relief in exchange for Iran holding up its end of the bargain.

Jeffrey 3:40

Yeah, it's a strange sort of bill because in one sense, Congress could do this anyway. If the president – Congress is the body that passed the sanctions and provided the waiver authority. And so with or without this bill, if Congress collectively did not like the Iran deal the president brought back, they could just pass a bill that – Removes the president's waiver authority, and it would go through the same process.

I mean, what makes this different is there are provisions for submitting the agreement, and there are time limits on the review process, and then there are reporting requirements that come after. But at some fundamental level, yeah, Congress could do this anyway, right?

Aaron 4:35

Right. I mean, I guess they have the legal authority to do this, but politics has interjected itself into this debate. And so there are politics behind this bill. I mean, this is the latest iteration of what happened.

Jeffrey 4:45

Wait! There are politics behind a bill before the United States Senate?

Aaron 4:50

In the world's greatest deliberative body, I think politics reigns supreme rather than actually deliberations about the law, at least when it comes to Iran sanctions. I'm shocked, Aaron, to hear this. Me too. I mean one thinks these men are just – men and women I should say are just working hard with the greatest interest of the entire country and not just their constituency and their reelection campaigns in mind.

No, no. No, no. There are politics.

Jeffrey 5:14

There are politics.

Aaron 5:16

This bill has a – it has like a long history.

Jeffrey 5:19

Yeah. So, I mean, the way I think of the bill is that it's an alternative to the Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation that was introduced in the last Congress and which was introduced in this Congress and which I fully expected to pass. I thought that they had the votes to pass Menendez-Kirk, which would have imposed new sanctions. Technically, it imposed the sanctions but held them in reserve.

But there were so many additional requirements that it effectively was a nice bottle of poison pills.

Aaron 5:57

You and I were so convinced that they were going to do this. I think we held a podcast in November.

Jeffrey 6:01

An emergency podcast.

Aaron 6:04

Yeah, I called you. You were standing in a parking lot. We said this is over because these guys are going to pass this bill.

Jeffrey 6:11

Yeah, but I didn't expect the impact that the Netanyahu invite and the Cotton Letter and all of the other – All of the other freak show-like activities.

Aaron 6:25

Does this elevate to your definition of goat rodeo?

Jeffrey 6:30

No. I think of a goat rodeo as a special event. You know, the rodeo comes to town. And this is just plain old run-of-the-mill crazy on the hill.

Aaron 6:40

Right. So Congress, I guess, consistently shot themselves in the foot for what probably was a bill that we thought was going to pass. So much so that I called you in the parking lot and there were cars starting up in the background of the podcast. So let's start there.

Jeffrey 6:54

Well, I mean, one of the reasons I mentioned that Congress could do this anyway is that all of this really essentially comes down to the president's ability to veto any bill that takes away his waiver authority. And The ability to exercise that veto requires just holding together enough Democrats to prevent an override in the Senate, which shouldn't be that hard.

No, that should be easy. He is a Democrat and he is the president. And and and, you know. I don't know if you have seen Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia gets all sore and frankly I think a little whiny whenever people point out that his support for some of these measures makes a military action against Iran more likely.

So you would think that if the president had an ounce of toughness in him – And that's a pretty effective cudgel that he could have wielded in order to keep the Democratic caucus together. But he just – he doesn't seem capable of doing that.

Aaron 8:05

Yeah, well – and in a way – You don't call it – I mean what has transpired? I mean with the Netanyahu invite, the Cotton 47, let's call it, and then the – let's say the problems Menendez has run into, the president was able to back himself into a compromise that at least he could sign off on that doesn't kill the bill with all these poison pills.

Would you say that's accurate?

Jeffrey 8:29

Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, one of the reasons that I'm not a particular fan of congressional involvement in foreign policy is illustrated by this bill, which is the way that I look at it. Democrats in Congress want the bill to go through, but they don't want to have to vote for it. And so what they're setting up is this thing where they can vote for Congress's role and And some of them can even vote to disapprove the deal.

But as long as they can hold together – well, I guess I would say in the first place, if they can hold together enough votes to filibuster it, the deal can go through without them having to take any action at all, which makes me crazy, right? Because this whole argument for Congress having a role – It sounds really great and it sounds like a civics lesson, but then when you look at the way that Congress executes that role, they've designed this bill so that the agreement can go into force without them actually having to take any courageous votes.

Aaron 9:40

Well, this is the same Congress that's balked at voting for a war resolution for the wars we're fighting in the Middle East. So I don't expect anything more, but I think you're exactly right. The way it's being framed is that it's a win-win for Congress because they get to vote in favor of Congress having a role. But when the president probably is going to veto it, they then will not vote to override the veto.

So they get to look tough to their constituents without actually being tough. This is a complete – This is a complete cover your booty type – Posterior. Cover your posterior type move on their things to appeal to a certain – To appeal to some members of their caucus or electorate before they go into re-election campaign.

Jeffrey 10:22

It's the reason that I'm no fan of the 535 secretaries of state approach because they don't actually operate that way. By the way, did you see what the Corker bill was introduced now that it's voted out of committee as? No, tell me. It's an amendment to H.R. 1191 to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to ensure that emergency services volunteers are not taken into account as employees under the shared responsibility requirements contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Aaron 10:54

You've got to be kidding me.

Jeffrey 10:55

Yeah, no, it's an amendment to an Obamacare bill.

Aaron 10:59

So we're having this congressional craziness about having to interject themselves without really interjecting themselves into an agreement that hasn't been signed yet. It's attached to an Obamacare legislation. Oh, my gosh. So this is really just complete nonsense. But it actually matters because it raises a question, you know, because we have moved on from what was Kirk Menendez into what is now Corker Cardin.

And I think it raises a question about because they created this loophole where Congress gets to pretend like it's doing something but it's not actually doing something. Did Corker have good intentions or not? And what role did Cardin play as this as he took the place of Menendez?

Jeffrey 11:35

Yeah, I think Corker is just a fascinating character because on the one hand, he clearly, I think, has presidential aspirations and is certainly – Sophisticated about the politics involved. On the other hand, Corker voted for the New START agreement. One of the questions I've always wondered or had is whether the Obama administration might have done more to make Corker an ally.

I think you see this playing out over this deal where Corker is very insistent that his goal was to give Congress a role and I think if you read between the lines, it's to come up with a bill that isn't just a thinly disguised collection of poison pills. But I don't think the administration saw it that way.

And I know that a lot of my colleagues who support the Iran deal don't see it that way. They just see it as – they see the poison pills as having a slightly thicker coat of sugar. Yeah. So I don't know. I suspect Corker himself is quite sincere. But I think maybe he overestimates the importance of his own sincerity relative to the structural aspects of partisanship right down to his own staff.

I'm curious.

Aaron 13:22

Do you think he's trying to become – dust off what John Kyle used to be in the Senate?

Jeffrey 13:27

I don't know. I just don't know the man. I observe that he wears spectacularly expensive suits. He's befitting a person of great wealth. And he has at times I think signaled that he would like to be president.

Aaron 13:49

So he has to look tough on Iran if he does this.

Jeffrey 13:52

But he also does seem to – He didn't have to do this. I don't see what the upside with his own caucus is. So that's why I lean toward thinking that he's sincere. There's no upside for him, I think, politically to have done this. The upside would have been in just killing the deal.

Aaron 14:14

Well, I mean – so that really schisms into two separate issues. I mean one, do you think there was a role for Cardin in this? I mean he certainly – Appears to be far less, let's say, militant against the deal. Sorry, he seems to be far more in favor of the deal, I should say, than Menendez was, and a bit more willing to compromise with Republicans to try and put something in place that at least, again, can assert that congressional role without making that congressional role just a vehicle for a poison pill to kill it.

Jeffrey 14:48

Was that piece in Politico that talked about Cardin's role after he replaced Menendez as the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Am I remembering that correctly?

Aaron 14:58

You were. It's Harry Reid basically saying there's one quarterback and you've got to take us home on this.

Jeffrey 15:04

I thought that was a really interesting profile of, of Cardin. It, first of all, it's interesting to me that he can play that role, right? That, that there are, that the president doesn't have enough support in the democratic caucus to just hold them together in favor of, of, of reaching an agreement. But yeah, Cardin really seems to have worked with Corker to produce something that the president could live with or that the president had to live with because it would have had a veto-proof majority in the Senate.

I'm not sure which came first.

Aaron 15:41

I'm not either. Part of me thinks that – obviously there was backroom agreement to this. I mean part of me thinks that Cardin – And Corker – I tend to agree with you because Corker did not have to do this. He could have killed this thing. Did this basically to give a way forward, to try and give diplomacy a chance.

So maybe in this specific case, it was a Republican and Corker trying to figure out a way to actually do what he thinks is right, which is Congress playing a role, even though I don't agree with that. Right.

Jeffrey 16:12

Well, yeah. It's really, really strange. But now we have the bill. And the bill is – how did Josh Earnest, the president's spokesperson say? He said the president isn't thrilled about it, but he would sign it. Yeah. Voted out of committee unanimously. Now it's on the floor attached to an Obamacare bill.

Aaron 16:35

Obamacare bill, so put that aside. Okay. And now it's – yeah, and now it's taking a little bit of a turn. Yeah?

Jeffrey 16:43

Yeah, yeah. Well, now we're going to have I think Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, said a robust amendments process. Is this a go rodeo?

Aaron 16:51

I want something big go rodeo on this podcast. No, no. This is just more freak show.

Jeffrey 16:57

Let me write it down for you. Ron Johnson, the Tea Party senator from Wisconsin, wants to amend it so the deal requires a two-thirds majority to go through, which is evidently a poison pill. There was both in the committee and now rumors that there will again be on the floor amendments to try to tie this to Iran's involvement in terrorism, which obviously the Iranians would not accept.

And Marco Rubio and Mark Kirk. Are proposing amendments, and I haven't seen any of these things, so some of these may be fake amendments, right?

Aaron 17:42

Yeah, posturing.

Jeffrey 17:43

But amendments to conditioning the deal on the release of Jason Rezaian, another one conditioning the deal on Iran recognizing Israel. I think it's Rubio. I think that, well, okay. And actually, I think also Marco Rubio wants a pony.

Aaron 18:05

Unicorn. This is bad politics to me. I mean, because if you are game planning this out in your scenario, the thing would be is you aren't actually going for the bill is going to pass. But if the president vetoes it, you actually just need one Democrat, right? Who doesn't have veto proof?

Jeffrey 18:22

Wait, wait. Well, I mean you need – I mean you need more than one Democrat.

Aaron 18:27

Right. I mean sorry. You just need to peel away one of the 34 I should say that would then be up there to make sure it's not veto proof. Well, there are more than 34 Democrats in the Senate, aren't there? Sorry. I'm game planning out. What are you trying to say here, man? My point is that the Republicans – There are 44.

Jeffrey 18:43

So you got to get 11 of them.

Aaron 18:47

Yes. I'm not articulating myself clearly. What I mean to say is that of the – to push yourself over the veto-proof majority, you just need one. And so by being so – like trying to interject these poison pills again, you're sort of rallying the Democratic caucus, are you not?

Jeffrey 19:03

Yeah, I think so. And in fact, that's why AIPAC is siding with the president today.

Aaron 19:10

Right. I mean I think they realize the writing on the wall and they're going to try and salvage – or try and interject a robust congressional approval into this process again. And I think being associated with killing the bill is detrimental, I mean, to APEC's organization and their thing. But I think it would also be detrimental to the Republicans moving forward.

Jeffrey 19:32

Yeah. So did you see Lindsey Graham – Made precisely this point. Yeah. I have written down his little quotation. He said, anybody who offers an amendment that will break this agreement apart, the beneficiary will be the Iranians.

Aaron 19:55

I think that's a correct assessment because it sets it up that we are at that point where the Iranians have agreed to a certain probably timeline to implement the deal. And then we'll have been abiding by agreements in the JPOA or JCPOA, whatever we're calling it now. By the way – Go ahead.

Jeffrey 20:15

Oh, I like that you paused after I read that because you weren't sure the quote was done because Lindsey Graham phrased that like he's Yoda.

Aaron 20:23

I actually have it open in front of me.

Jeffrey 20:26

I didn't realize how weird it sounded until I spoke it out loud and then I thought, well, maybe if I try it in a southern accent, it will sound less weird.

Aaron 20:32

No, I don't mean to be partisan on the show. It just sounds weird. But like there's a few times when Lindsey Graham sort of like speaks about foreign policy issues that I find myself going, yeah, that's a good point, Lindsey.

Jeffrey 20:42

Yeah, I never – I never experienced that with any member of Congress.

Aaron 20:47

Right.

Jeffrey 20:47

So I don't – Oh, you actually – oh, you agree. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron 20:52

I was surprised I agreed. But no, no. I think he's right. And so – If we get to that point and Congress is seen as being the one who killed a deal, I'm not sure how you would pick up the pieces after that actually for American foreign policy more broadly. I think this is a bigger discussion. If Congress screws this up, what does that say about our foreign policy?

Jeffrey 21:15

Well, I mean, that's one of the really interesting aspects to this entire debate, which is the desire, I think, to harm the president, to deny him a legacy issue and to embarrass him comes at the expense of the country as a whole. And that's just one of these frustrating things about the way our democracy works that, you know, The foreign policy can often be a political winner for the president.

And so Our desire to see a president of either party suffer a political defeat does sort of raise uncomfortable questions about whether one is putting partisan interests ahead of that of the country. There's a related issue though, which is what I think AIPAC has figured out. My friend Chuck Freelick, do you ever read Chuck's stuff?

Aaron 22:14

No.

Jeffrey 22:15

Oh, Chuck is great. So Chuck's at Harvard now. He was a deputy national security advisor in Israel and was – he's a Netanyahu guy who's very reasonable, very sensible, and has written a very good op-ed. It's only in Hebrew, but he did a translation and sent it around. It was in Haaretz. Another foreign thing that I'm probably massacring.

So he made the argument that – This should be a giant victory for Netanyahu in terms of taking the Iranian program, putting it on the international agenda, and focusing international attention on limiting the program. But instead is worried that Netanyahu now has gone so far that he's squandering that victory and damaging the U.S.-Israel relationship in the process.

And my guess is that that kind of thinking is – What's informing APAC's decision to try to clear away some of these amendments, right? Note this idea that, you know, That there's a limit to what one can reasonably expect to do and a limit to how much one can involve oneself in the policy process without really damaging the relationship.

Aaron 23:36

I have two thoughts on that. I mean I was talking with a Gulfie, with the Qatari, and there was a similar argument being made on the Qatari side to this. I mean they are not as militantly against the deal as the Saudis are, but they're – Approach to this was along the lines of, well, you know, it's not the best deal, you know, and we don't trust the Iranians, but, you know, this is probably going to get us something that we actually never had said out loud before at this upcoming meeting at Camp David, which is a direct U.S. security guarantee.

And this is something that will come – this has been a longstanding policy goal of theirs and they could actually realize it and sort of like I guess make lemonade out of lemons if that's a phrase.

Jeffrey 24:19

Yeah. You say that about the Saudis. I mean you talk to more Gulfies than I do. I mean I get the sense that the Saudis are wary and they don't trust the Iranians with good reason. Yeah. But the official Saudi position was hopeful that a deal will work out, and I don't feel like the Saudis have – I don't think they've played a disruptive role, and nor do I think the UAE has.

But do you get the sense that privately it's just – it's a lot more anxiety than we're seeing publicly? Yeah.

Aaron 24:56

You don't see it manifested particularly with Iran anymore. I mean, with the Iran nuclear deal, it's just gotten bigger. I'll take a slightly different role. The level of paranoia about Iran that you hear from Saudi people. That was a Qatari I was quoting earlier.

Jeffrey 25:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but you started by saying that they weren't as militantly against the deal as the Saudis and I was just – Yeah.

Aaron 25:18

Well, the Saudis, their paranoia about Iran, I'd say it's like a 12 out of 10. So the president has a heavy lift coming for him.

Jeffrey 25:27

Well, they are actively involved in military operations against Iranian proxies in Yemen. Yeah.

Aaron 25:35

I mean it's gotten – It's gotten bad, but I would say that the nuclear deal has just added to an anxiety that's been building for a while now. So I think regardless – the nuclear deal made it worse, but discomfort with where we were going in the region has been building for a while. But just coming back to AIPAC, I have another thought on AIPAC too.

So I definitely think that that's there. AIPAC's – Doesn't like to lose. And AIPAC lost this fight. And so I think they're recalibrating just to put themselves on the right side of history here, not in terms of them supporting the deal. That's not what I mean. In terms of when this comes out, AIPAC will not have stood against the bill that will pass.

And so I think some of their ethos or some of their sort of Mystique around their influence builds around the fact that they usually support bills that pass because they generally have widespread support to begin with. And this is one of them where I think they may be overstepped by going a little too far in favor of Kirk Menendez.

Now they're coming back a little bit and they're going with the next best thing to just chalk up a victory. So that's my think of it. That's just smart. Yeah, that's smart lobbying. I mean, that's what I would do.

Jeffrey 26:46

There was that old op-ed by Norman Ornstein 20 years ago where he said, winners win.

Aaron 26:53

That's what they do. Yeah. So I think they put themselves on the right side of this thing. So that comes out with a W and then they move on to the next fight. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because this will come back. Yeah. This will come out in the foreign aid bill. The F-35 is being expedited to Israel.

I mean there are all things that are going on here that are attached to this. But I think that they can chalk up as wins.

Jeffrey 27:16

Yeah, so I know for a fact that during the New START process, certain – should I even protect this guy? A very senior official in the first Bush administration who ended up supporting the New START treaty – His primary question, being politically oriented, was whether the treaty was going to pass or not. And his weighing in in favor of the treaty was as much calibrated to give the impression that he had weighed in and contributed to the win as it was any sense of the merits of the agreement itself.

Which I thought was both very telling about that individual but also revealing about how politics in our country works.

Aaron 28:17

Well, I mean it actually raises a bigger question. Just getting back to the thing – to the bill. Is – there's now going to be at least a – well, I mean a 52-day window after they signed the deal where – I guess it would be like what's called the implementation phase. Is that what you want to call it?

I think that's what they are. Yeah, that's what they're calling it. I mean do we want to wait 52 days to require something of Iran before we lift sanctions?

Jeffrey 28:45

I think they're going to. I think they have to. Oh, they have to.

Aaron 28:48

But yeah, so what do you think about that?

Jeffrey 28:51

Well, okay, so one of the big concerns about the original version of the bill was that the delay would be so long that Congress could in essence kill off an agreement by just dithering. But 30 days plus 10 plus 12 or plus 12 plus 10. I'm wrong in my notes again. That's not so long. And there was this discussion about whether or not the sanctions relief would be immediate.

Because the US said no and the Iranians said yes. But like a lot of things, that was a lot of spin, I think, on both sides. When you actually dug down, the two sides were saying the same thing, which was from the moment the agreement is signed, the parties have a series of steps they have to take.

And obviously, not everything can physically happen overnight, right? I mean, you can't have a vote in the UN Security Council at the moment the treaty is signed. So the... Parties had agreed on an implementation period, so the agreement would be signed. The parties would themselves take certain steps, and then after those steps were taken, the agreement would enter into force and sanctions would be lifted immediately.

So that allowed the US to say the Iranians had to take – For example, all of the key steps to extend breakout time to over a year. But the Iranians could at the same time say, no, no, no. Once the deal comes into effect, then the sanctions relief is immediate. Now, the big question is how long that's going to take, right?

Aaron 30:16

Yeah. I mean that's the issue. It's not even like the supreme leader's tweets or his speeches that – Gets everybody up in a tizzy or anything like that. It's how long will it take for this like let's say pre-coming into force period. Will this go on and how will that affect like I guess perceptions of the deal and even implementation down the road?

Jeffrey 30:39

Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question. I know that the State Department spokesperson was asked how long an implementation period would last. And I think the U.S. answer was six months. Somebody put that before Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, and he got very annoyed and basically said, you know, well, who says it'll be six months? Maybe it'll only be six weeks.

Yeah. I think at the point where you're talking six weeks, that's awfully close to 52 days. It's not exactly 52 days, but it's in that neighborhood. I think the Iranians probably are overestimating how quickly they will be able to take certain steps. They've got to reduce, for example, I think all of the The stockpile of the LEU down to 300 kilograms or less.

And I know that the sides haven't, or at least I shouldn't say I know anymore because the minute you know something, it's out of date, right? But as of when talks broke in Luzon, I am certain that there was not agreement on how that would happen. Only that there was agreement on that it would happen and that there were several routes by which they could reduce.

They could down blend. They could ship things out of the country. They could sell it, whatever.

Aaron 31:59

All of which would – the latter two would take more than 52 days.

Jeffrey 32:03

Yeah, maybe, right? Well, I don't know. If you ship it out of the country, you might be able to do that quickly. So yeah. So I don't think the review period – while again, I think this is totally unnecessary and I think that it is – A perfect symbol of why I find congressional action on foreign policy totally frustrating.

Because they're going to allow the agreement to go through without having to vote for it after having talked about how important it was that they have a role in voting for it. But having said that, the actual terms of it, waiting 52 days while Congress has hearings and people propose some silly amendments and whatnot, doesn't strike me as being the end of the world.

Aaron 32:47

No, no. And just like a far broader thing – When I look at the U.S. fact sheet, I look at the statements from both sides and I look at the obvious workarounds like this implementation period. I now give our negotiators all the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's crazy. OK, but, you know, like the emergency podcast in November where we were talking about how this isn't the deal we would sign.

We would focus on X, Y, Z and they ultimately did focus on X, Y, Z. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. So I think the stuff that we're worrying about now are things that our negotiators will be able to work out and work out well. I don't know about you. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

Jeffrey 33:26

Look, I'm torn. On the one hand, I have learned in this business to never be optimistic. I have watched – Administrations of all political stripes, including this one, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That's true. So there's a healthy – well, I would say there's a bedrock of my commitment to diplomatic solutions is an awareness that usually they don't work.

So I'm not – I'm never optimistic. But having said that, you're right. The terms of the agreement as I understand them both in terms of the fact sheet and the information that's been presented publicly and the conversations I've had with people leads me to think that they are – Very, very close to a really strong deal. And that's not what I expected.

And so, you know, I have to eat a little bit of humble pie, I guess. But... But yeah, they've certainly earned – they've earned some time from me before I'm going to say too much bad about them because I'm impressed.

Aaron 34:40

Yeah, no, I think it's a more apt and articulate way to say it than I did. I think they've earned the benefit of the doubt for now.

Jeffrey 34:49

And that's an even more apt and articulate way to say it than I did.

Aaron 34:53

Well, cliff notes from your version. No, I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt because what we've seen so far is very strong despite the naysaying out there. Everything is very strong and I think they're really close. So I don't know. Are we going back in time? Is this a positive and happy note to end the podcast on?

Jeffrey 35:13

It could be. So, yeah. Yeah, it could be. It could be a positive happy note.

Aaron 35:18

It could be. Sort of a wait-and-see type positive note.

Jeffrey 35:22

Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron 35:23

Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. And Jeffrey, thanks for going in into the ins and outs of the bill. Whether we get the 10 or 12 days right, you know, it's all going to come down pretty soon. I blame my notes, man. Yeah, it happens. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Have a good night.

Jeffrey 35:40

Hey, and don't forget, write us a review on iTunes. It helps get the word out about the podcast.

Aaron 35:44

Yeah, we need it. So come on, write something down there.