Ever since the wee hours of November 9, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker has been fluffing himself as the next secretary of state. Sometimes he’s claimed he’s a contender, at other times that he’s “in the mix” (wtf, right?), a couple of times he’s said he wasn’t interested. But he’s there with that “lean and hungry look” that some dead white guy wrote about back before the internet. Bob Corker lusts after that office like Bill Clinton lusts after Jeffrey Epstein’s harem and Chris Christie lusts after a Krispy Kreme.

Corker, however, seems to know that his shameful dereliction of duty in regards to his support of giving Iran nuclear weapons is a stumbling block. To try to remedy this he has dispatched a couple of staffers to try to create a false narrative of what actually happened with the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA).

Rarely will you read such a monumental exercise in blatant dishonesty. National Review’s Andy McCarthy fisks it down to its bones but a couple of overarching points need to be made. Quoting McCarthy:

First, Iran has decided that it will possess nuclear weapons. The choice the West (and I use that term loosely because Russia and China were involved in the deal) had to make was to resist Iran’s progress, acquiesce to its progress, or aid its progress. To the everlasting shame of everyone involved the latter option was chosen and the blood of tens of thousands will eventually be on their hands. The choice Bob Corker had was even more stark. He could resist a truly bad deal and make it very, very difficult for Obama to proceed with his preferred option. Or he could be Obama’s b***h. For reasons known only to Corker, though being a moral cripple has to rank up near the top of them, Corker elected to help Obama push this through the Senate and gave cover for weak-kneed GOP and Democrat senators who were afraid to oppose Obama but who wanted to claim they did.

Congress expressly approved the commencement of this sanction-lifting. Congress further agreed to accept the president’s proposal to end the sanctions — subject only to a disapproval resolution, which Congress, under the INARA formula, then chose not to enact. Corker’s text is not a model of clarity, but you can bet that this is how the INARA would be interpreted by many, many federal judges (nearly 400 of whom have been appointed by President Obama).

Had there been no INARA — even better, had the Republican-controlled Senate and House passed resolutions affirming the sense of each chamber that the Iran deal was a non-binding executive agreement that needed congressional approval in order to have legal effect in the United States — President Donald Trump could have, upon his inauguration, simply rescinded the deal and announced that all congressional sanctions would henceforth be fully enforced. But thanks to Corker’s INARA, it is very likely that the nuclear sanctions are dead; they’d have to be reenacted from scratch. Indeed, it is the assumption that the INARA killed the sanctions that induced big corporations to commence business with Iran — such as Boeing’s aforementioned $17.6 billion deal to supply aircraft to the “Death to America” regime.

President Trump, or anyone on his team, if you read this, please, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t name Bob Corker to any position that requires judgment or courage.