After having failed to put any meaningful points on the board during his first year in office, President Joe Biden has recently shown that he’s now willing to bend the knee to Iran in order to bring it back to the negotiating table with regard to the terror-sponsoring country’s nuclear program.

According to Fox News, Republican senators are already gearing up for a fight to block any executive decisions on the matter.

A group of 33 GOP senators, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), just warned the president in a letter that any deals or decisions regarding Iran’s nuclear program must be passed through the upper chamber, vowing to block anything that happens without Senate approval.

The senators cited the grave national security concerns such a deal would be, and because of that, they insist that any deal with Iran would be considered a treaty, which requires congressional approval.

“Congressional oversight”

The Republican senators who signed off on the letter made crystal clear in their wording that the Biden administration had better play by the rules on this particular matter.

“We write to call attention to a range of obligations that your administration is statutorily mandated to fulfill in relation to Congressional oversight over any such agreement,” the senators wrote.

They added: “[W]e are committed to using the full range of options and leverage available to United States Senators to ensure that you meet those obligations, and that the implementation of any agreement will be severely if not terminally hampered if you do not.”

Notably, the GOP senators aren’t against a new deal with Iran, noting in the letter that a “genuinely robust” deal would certainly gain bipartisan support in the upper chamber.

They went on to say that because of that fact, they believe if the Biden admin attempts to take action without Senate approval, the deal would likely be very bad for America, and would be “too weak to pass muster.”

Approval requirements

In addition, the senators pointed out that the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), put into place at the time by the Obama administration, contains language that requires any deal reached with Iran to be submitted to Congress for approval within five days of a deal being reached.

The same rules still hold true if, ultimately, the Biden administration returns to the original Iran nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

But those senators, and other critics, believe that at this point, with the advances Iran has likely made, the JCPOA isn’t strong enough, meaning that any new negotiations must require Senate approval. If the Biden administration fails to do that, the Republicans have vowed to reverse any new deals upon electing a Republican president in 2024.