No sooner had the White House made the surprise announcement Tuesday afternoon that the president planned to lift Cuba's designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism than Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill made their reactions known.
Along with acquiring some highly critical comments from several Republican House members immediately after the announcement, Newsmax learned Tuesday that Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida) planned to introduce legislation shortly that would maintain the terrorist designation for the communist island-state.
Ros-Lehtinen, a past chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and herself the daughter of anti-Castro refugees from Cuba, has a long history of vigorously opposing any opening to Cuba so long as the Castro brothers are in power.
"This is not a strategic decision or one based on circumstances," freshman Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Florida), also the son of Cuban immigrants, told Newsmax shortly after the announcement from the White House. "It is a condition spelled out by the Cuban government during secret negotiations.
"And it is reckless."
Curbelo's view was seconded by another freshman Republican, David Rouzer of North Carolina, who told Newsmax that ending Cuba's terrorist designation was "a terrible mistake and it sends a terrible message to the rest of the world."
Rouzer recalled his onetime boss and mentor, the late Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina). Helms, he told us, "used to quote his father as saying 'you are part of what you condone.' That fits this situation quite well."
Although they believed Ros-Lehtinen's measure would breeze through the House and probably the Senate as well, the same House members privately voiced concern to us that Ros-Lehtinen's measure might not be able to muster the two-thirds vote in Congress needed to overcome a certain presidential veto.
They pointed to several Republicans, among them Sen. Jeff Flake and Rep. Mark Sanford, who are longtime supporters of an opening to Havana.
But Sanford is not so sure on this particular point. Reached by Newsmax on Wednesday morning, the South Carolinian said, "given the history of this president, it would concern me if he's taken another questionable constitutional act and stepping out of the historic process.
"The history of our nation is not built around one man's opinion and, in fact, the Founding Fathers feared one man's opinion."
Sanford, who became the first GOP member of Congress to introduce legislation lifting the travel ban to Cuba nearly 20 years ago, did note that "in fairness, I have not seen a lot of activity by Cuba in support of ISIS or other bad actors on the world scene."
He did add, however, "that I'm going to look carefully at what the president has done before I make any decision."
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax.