President Barack Obama on Friday called on Republicans to schedule a vote on his nominee to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, calling Loretta Lynch’s months-long wait a case of Senate “dysfunction” gone too far.
At a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Obama also said he planned to make a “strong case” for his ambitious trade deal to skeptics within his own party and he left open the possibility that sanctions on Iran might be lifted at once if a deal over the country’s nuclear program is reached.
He said the details of the Iran deal would be hammered out by Secretary of State John Kerry and negotiators, but he noted that “there are a lot of different mechanism and ways” to lessen the sanctions.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that the deal would be signed in late June only if economic sanctions were lifted at once, though the U.S. has insisted they’d be lifted in phases.
But Obama said Friday that the negotiators’ job would be “to sometimes find formulas that get to our main concerns while allowing the other side to make a presentation to their body politic that is more acceptable.”
More important than the timing, the president said, would be ensuring that economic sanctions against Tehran could be snapped back into place if Iran doesn’t live up to the deal.
“Our main concern here is making sure that if Iran doesn’t abide by its agreement, that we don’t have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops in order to reinstate sanctions,” Obama said.
The president saved his most impassioned remarks for his attorney general nominee, Lynch, who he said had waited more than twice as long as the previous seven attorney-general nominees combined to get a vote in the Senate.
“There’s no reason for it,” Obama said, noting that few have argued that Lynch is not qualified for the job. “Nobody can describe a reason for it beyond political gamesmanship in the Senate on an issue that’s completely unrelated to her.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he won’t give Lynch a confirmation vote until an anti-trafficking bill passes. But the bill to aid human trafficking victims is tied up in abortion politics, with Democrats objecting to an anti-abortion provision in the measure.
McConnell’s office noted, however, that he’d said Thursday night that senators were making progress on the trafficking bill and that he hoped it would be passed early next week. A vote on Lynch’s nomination would follow.
“I guess they don’t have C-SPAN down there at the White House,” McConnell’s deputy chief of staff, Don Stewart, suggested in an email.
Obama criticized the 160-plus-day wait, calling it a “crazy” situation: “Enough. Enough,” he said. “Call Loretta Lynch for a vote. Get her confirmed. Put her in place. Let her do her job. This is embarrassing, a process like this.”
On trade, the president hailed bipartisan legislation that would give him special trade-promotion authority to help secure a trade package to sell more U.S. goods throughout the Pacific Rim.
He acknowledged that the politics of trade have “always been tough, particularly in the Democratic Party,” because of outsourcing and job losses associated with past deals.
But he said the new package took lessons from past mistakes and included “strong, enforceable” labor and environmental provisions.
And he said the agreement would strengthen the U.S.’s ability to force open other markets.
“Being opposed to this new trade agreement is essentially a ratification of the status quo, where a lot of folks are selling here, but we’re not selling there,” he said, comparing the abundance of Japanese cars in the U.S. with the paucity of American cars in Tokyo. “The current situation is not working for us. And I don’t know why it is that folks would be opposed to us opening up the Japanese market more for U.S. autos or U.S. beef. It doesn’t make any sense.”
The visit was the first to the White House for Renzi as Italy’s leader and he hailed Obama, congratulating him for looking to restore ties with Cuba, which he called a “very complex issue.” And he came bearing gifts, saying he “brought a few bottles of wine to Barack because I know that he’s a great expert.”
Obama said it would not go uncorked: “With respect to the wine, I felt it would be insulting for me not to sample it and to establish the strong commercial bonds between the United States of America when it comes to Tuscan wine.”
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