President Barack Obama is treating his drive to win congressional support for his nuclear deal with Iran like a political campaign, making attacks on opponents that need to stop, Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday.
McConnell's comments came as the Senate left town for a summer recess that both sides in the dispute plan to use to try lining up support for showdown votes next month. They followed a tumultuous early debate over the nuclear agreement in which Republican opponents of the agreement have used strong language to criticize Obama.
Obama so far "is treating this like a political campaign," McConnell told reporters. "Demonize your opponents, gin up the base, get Democrats all angry and, you know, rally around the president. To me, it's a different kind of issue."
The majority leader has said he wants senators to spend next month's debate over the Iran deal planted in their seats — an unusual step underscoring the issue's gravity.
Lawmakers are required to vote on whether to accept the Iran agreement by Sept. 17. Opposition is almost solid from Republicans arguing that the U.S. gave away too much in negotiations and from many Democrats sympathetic to Israel, which considers the pact a disaster.
It's nearly certain that the Republican-controlled Congress will reject the deal, and that Obama will veto that bill. That means the suspense is over whether Obama can corral enough Democratic support to sustain his veto and keep the agreement alive.
"It's those hard-liners chanting 'Death to America' who have been most opposed to the deal," Obama said of Tehran demonstrators in a speech Wednesday defending the multination agreement. "They're making common cause with the Republican caucus."
McConnell pointedly objected to those remarks, saying, "The president ought to treat this like a serious national security debate rather than a political campaign and tone down the rhetoric and talk about the facts."
Yet in recent weeks, some Republicans have pulled no punches to criticize Obama over the agreement, which would lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for Tehran mothballing its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon for at least a decade.
Presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz, said the pact would make the Obama administration "the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism" because lifting the sanctions would restore money to Iran that it could use to support terrorist groups it sponsors.
Another Republican presidential contender, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, said Obama is marching Jews "to the door of the oven" — a reference to both the Holocaust and Israel's strong opposition to the agreement.
On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain, a leading Republican, said of Obama, "He's carrying on in the finest traditions of Neville Chamberlain," the British prime minister best known for unsuccessfully trying to appease Germany's Adolf Hitler before World War II.
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Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.
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