WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats delivered a major victory to President Obama when they blocked a Republican resolution to reject a six-nation nuclear accord with Iran on Thursday, ensuring the landmark deal will take effect without a veto showdown between Congress and the White House.

A procedural vote fell two short of the 60 needed to break a Democratic filibuster. It culminated hours of debate in the Senate and capped weeks of discord since the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China announced the agreement with Iran in July.

The debate divided Democrats between their loyalties to the president and to their constituents, animated the antiwar movement on the left and exposed the diminishing power of the Israeli lobbying force that spent tens of millions of dollars to prevent the accord.

“Regardless of how one feels about the agreement,” Senator Chuck Schumer, one of four Democrats to vote against Mr. Obama, said on the Senate floor, “fair-minded Americans should acknowledge the president’s strong achievements in combating and containing Iran.”

Acknowledging the tortured road he and other skeptical Democrats traveled, Mr. Schumer said, “I also have a great deal of respect for the careful thought and deliberation my colleagues went through,” adding, “I recognize for them that this is a vote of conscience just as it is for me.”

Mr. Obama’s triumph in securing the deal — without the support of a single member of the party now in control of Congress — is refashioning the definition of victory for a waning presidency in the era of divided government.

While bipartisan victories tend to be those most celebrated outside of Washington, success by the president is now often measured more by the scope of the policy achieved than by any claim of sweeping consensus. And losing has its own evolving meaning as well. Republicans will use Mr. Obama’s triumph — as they did with the health care law — as a means to attack Democrats in anticipation of next year’s election.
Indeed, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said Thursday that he would force the exact same vote again next week, just to make Democrats go through the exercise one last time. “If the president’s so proud of this deal, he shouldn’t be afraid,” Mr. McConnell said, as he stared at Democrats on the floor immediately after the vote.

It is highly unlikely that any senator will change his or her vote.

Mr. Obama is likely to go down in history as a rare president whose single biggest foreign policy and domestic achievements were won with no Republican votes, a stark departure from his 2008 campaign that was fueled by the promise of bridging Washington’s yawning partisan divide. As with the Iran accord, the health care law — passed exclusively with Democratic votes — was a policy achievement that has come to define his presidency, in part through the vehemence of its opponents in Congress.

“President Obama can claim that he found a way to move an extremely important, yet controversial, diplomatic agreement through the political process,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton. “For conservatives the deal fulfills every negative view that they have about President Obama and the way Democrats handle foreign threats,” he added.
The president, in a statement, called the vote “a victory for diplomacy, for American national security, and for the safety and security of the world.”

To be sure, while Mr. Obama has shown he can build victories on the back of Democratic votes alone, he has occasionally built coalitions with Republicans, as was the case with a major trade package over the summer.

But the sheer partisan nature of the Iran matter does not bode well for impending fights on Capitol Hill, most notably fights over federal spending and whether to raise the debt ceiling.

On Thursday, senators came to the chamber floor to defend or excoriate the deal, evoking everything from Nazis to fissile material to the Syrian refugee crisis.

“I’ve never been more disappointed in the body than I am today,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who has long protested the deal. “You won’t let us have a vote. You won’t let us have a debate. And please stop saying this deal makes Israel safer. That’s cruel.”

Many others said the deal was the best that the United States and its negotiating partners could achieve. “This agreement is flawed,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine. “But this is the agreement that is before us, and the analysis cannot be strictly of the agreement itself within its four corners, but compared to what? That really is the basic question here.”

House Republicans tried to derail the deal this week by claiming that the White House had not disclosed secret side agreements of the accord, and, as such, had not given Congress the agreed-upon 60 days for review.

The House declined to vote on a resolution of disapproval, even though it would have easily passed, and instead will opt for a series of other votes intended to undermine the president and embarrass Democrats, including one to approve the Iran agreement to force Democrats to assert their support for the accord.

(Source: New York Times)