Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who has been leading the drive for new sanctions legislation announced that he would delay introducing a sanctions bill until after March 24, the deadline for nuclear negotiators to reach a political framework. The American Iranian Council, which has always supported diplomacy and been against all sanctions on Iran, welcomes this delay as a positive step. As the Council suggested in previous statements, this bill was essentially designed as a pressure tactic for the US to extract the maximum possible concessions from Iran. Menendez’s announcement of a delay is consistent with our theory that the Congress and Administration have been playing a clumsy “good-cop-bad-cop” strategy all along.