Three more Democratic senators announced their support of President Obama’s Iran deal, bringing support for the deal to 41, sufficient to block a resolution against the deal from coming to the Senate floor.

Politico has the details:

President Barack Obama now has sufficient support in the Senate to reject a motion disapproving of his nuclear deal with Iran, after three key Democrats said they would back the accord on Tuesday morning.

Support from Sens. Gary Peters, Ron Wyden and Richard Blumenthal means Obama has yes votes from 41 Democrats, enough to deny the GOP a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes, though it’s not yet clear how Senate votes will be structured over the next two weeks.

Elijah Cummings today announced that he supports the agreement negotiated with Iran that has become the latest excuse for Republicans to oppose Barack Obama. All three actual and potential candidates in th Senate race now support the deal.

Baltimore Rep. Elijah E. Cummings said Tuesday he will support the controversial nuclear agreement with Iran brokered by the Obama administration and other world leaders, arguing that a rejection of the deal would “likely cause more harm to the United States, American interests, and our allies.”

Cummings, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, becomes the third member of Maryland’s mostly Democratic congressional delegation to back the agreement. Reps. Donna Edwards and Chris Van Hollen, both Democrats, also have announced their support.

“The fundamental issue for both the Congress and the American people to evaluate is clear: What is the alternative to moving forward with the very real restrictions placed by the [agreement] on the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon?” Cummings said in a statement. “Time is of the essence in answering this question. Some of our best nuclear scientists have concluded that without the approval and implementation of the [deal], Iran may be able to produce an operational nuclear weapon within months.”

In other Iran deal news today, two Democratic senators, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Chris Coons of Delaware announced their support for the deal, bringing the number of Democrats supporting the deal to 3233. We still haven’t heard from Ben Cardin yet, though.

Congressman Chris Van Hollen has issued a lengthy statement assessing his view of the terms of the proposed deal negotiated by the U.S. and other nations with Iran. Key points:

In my view, opponents of the agreement have failed to demonstrate how we will be in a better position if Congress were to block it. Without an agreement, the Iranians will immediately revert to their status as a threshold nuclear weapons state. In other words, they immediately pose the threat that Prime Minister Netanyahu warned about in his U.N. speech. At the same time, the international consensus we have built for sanctions, which was already starting to fray, would begin to collapse entirely. We would be immediately left with the worst of all worlds – a threshold nuclear weapons state with diminished sanctions and little leverage for the United States.

I disagree with the view that we can force the Iranians back to the negotiating table to get a better deal. All of our European partners have signed on to the current agreement. Consequently, the U.S. would be isolated in its quest to return to negotiations. And in the unlikely event that we somehow returned to negotiations, the critics have not presented a plausible scenario for achieving a better agreement in a world where fewer sanctions means less economic pressure.
The bottom line is that if Congress were to block the agreement and the Iranians were to resume nuclear enrichment activities, the only way to stop them, at least temporarily, would be by military action. That would unleash significant negative consequences that could jeopardize American troops in the region, drag us into another ground war in the Middle East, and trigger unpredictable responses elsewhere. Moreover, the United States would be totally isolated from most of the world, including our Western partners. The folly of that go-it-alone military approach would be compounded by the fact that such action would only deal a temporary setback to an Iranian nuclear program. They would likely respond by putting their nuclear enrichment activities deeper underground and would likely be more determined than ever to build a nuclear arsenal.

As it happens, I agree fully with what Van Hollen has said. The idea that there is some mythical “better deal” out there if we only act tough and keep saying no, is a fantasy. Those who hold most firmly to this pretend view of the world are the foreign policy idiots who’ve screwed up pretty much everything over the past 30 years, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to the nutty belief that invading Iraq would usher in a new era of American hegemony in the Middle East. They have no credibility. There’s no such thing as a perfect deal, but this deal is as good as we could have hoped for under all the circumstances.