Word is that a deal is in the making:

Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee said they had a deal Tuesday that could lead to a bipartisan vote in favor of giving Congress a vote to approve or disapprove a nuclear deal with Iran.

They would need a veto-proof majority, over 2/3, in order to make it stick despite a likely veto. That’s not easy to do. Here are the supposed terms, subject to further amendment:

Under the new timeline, Congress would have 30 days to review an agreement with Iran and pass a resolution of disapproval. The president would have 12 days to act on that resolution. Congress would then have an additional 10 days to respond to an expected veto, the aide explained…

The managers’ package will also include a requirement that the administration report regularly on Iran’s support of terrorist organizations and its pursuit of ballistic missile technology and capability, the aide said.

Those reporting requirements will replace a provision that would have required the administration to certify that Iran had renounced support for terrorism. The administration highlighted it as a major concern it had with the bill.

As I read this, I wonder how Congress would enforce such an agreement if Obama chose to ignore and/or defy it. After all (just to take one example), he ignored the 30-day notice to Congress requirement when he announced the release of the five Gitmo Taliban in the Bergdahl trade.

To take a hypothetical, what would Congress do if the administration failed to “report regularly on Iran’s support of terrorist organizations and its pursuit of ballistic missile technology”? Would it stomp its little feet? And what on earth would these “regular reports” accomplish, anyway? Chronicling the progress of Iran towards the bomb that a deal has made inevitable? What’s the remedy? Would Congress be ready to declare war on Iran?

It all seems to assume a degree of goodwill and cooperative spirit (or at the very least, of law-abiding propensity) on the part of the chief executive that simply does not exist in the case of Obama. And if such an act of Congress were to be defied, I wonder whether enough Democrats in the Senate would finally cross over the line and be willing to cooperate in an impeachment/conviction scenario—after all, it would be their own power that would have been usurped by the executive.

Somehow I doubt it. As I’ve written before, I have come to believe there is virtually nothing Obama could do (or fail to do) that would cause enough Democrats to turn on him that decisively.

However, this vote will be of interest if it can gain the 2/3 necessary to override a veto. That happens to be the same number needed for conviction in the Senate after an impeachment by majority vote in the House. Of course, voting “yea” on a bill like this is weak sauce indeed compared to removing a president from office. But it still would be a good sign if two-thirds of the Senate could be found who would be willing to support even a tiny act of defiance like this one.