House forms new bipartisan caucus to support Iranian women’s protests

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Capitol Hill is coalescing around a new bipartisan consensus towards Iran, as protests against the government in Tehran continue and a resumption of the 2015 nuclear accord seems further away than ever before.

On Thursday, lawmakers from both parties led by Congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee and Nancy Mace, a Democrat and Republican, respectively, formed the Congressional Iranian Women Caucus, a group focused on the advancement of human rights in the conservative Muslim country at a time when women across Iran are fighting for greater freedoms from their government.

The caucus leaders led the announcement of its formation on Thursday with a new bipartisan resolution, already cosponsored by more than a dozen Republicans and Democrats, that condemns a recent gas attack against schoolgirls in Iran. The resolution also calls on the State Department and United Nations to investigate the matter.

“So many Iranian women are showing their bravery and resiliency in the face of challenges in their fight for equality and human rights,” founding co-chair Nancy Mace said on Thursday.

“As we have witnessed, women and youth have displayed tremendous courage in leading the protests in Iran over the past five months,” she continued. “We will be on the side of freedom and oppose the oppression of women in the United States, Iran, and around the globe.”

It’s a sign that Democrats and Republicans alike are coming to terms with the realisation that President Joe Biden presented to a woman on a ropeline at a California event last December: That the Iran nuclear accord signed the last time he was in the White House is dead. After months of negotiations, neither side appeared willing to budge and meet the terms the other had laid out for resuming compliance with the treaty, and the issue was further complicated by allegations of tangible US support for the protests that have rocked Iran for months.

In November, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the door to future negotiations would “remain open” with Iran while adding that the current state of those talks did not look promising.

“The door for diplomacy will always remain open, but as of now we don’t see a deal coming together any time soon,” she said.

Meanwhile, foreign policy hawks in both parties, but especially the GOP, have continued to embrace the neoconservative view of relations with Iran which resulted in the “maximum pressure” campaign pursued by the Trump administration, which at several points looked poised to draw the US and Iran into armed conflict.

Proponents of that strategy contend that Iran’s government is structurally weak and is at its most fragile point in recent memory; crippling US sanctions that disrupt Iran’s economy and energy sector, they argue, will continue to weaken Tehran and lead to the collapse of its government.