President Obama’s powers never cease to amaze. He has made it suddenly fashionable to question others’ patriotism for dissenting on foreign policy, and has turned the Democrats — yes, the Democrats — into a presidential guard who respond with unthinking fury to skepticism about their leader’s claims to ever-expanding executive power.
This week, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and 46 other GOP senators signed an open letter to Iran’s political leadership. Their message, pertaining to the mullahs’ nuclear negotiations with the Obama administration, was very straightforward: Any deal they make with Obama that can’t pass muster in Congress will have a very short shelf-life — perhaps as short as Obama’s remaining 22 months in office.
“We wanted to make perfectly clear to Iran that we (the Senate) do not accept this as a binding deal if we do not approve it,” Cotton told the Washington Examiner this week. “We wanted to make absolutely certain that was communicated to the leadership of Iran.”
Some Democratic members of Congress, and especially liberal writers, have erupted with more than usual vituperation. They have, typically, insinuated that this letter is something unprecedented — it’s not even close, as theWashington Examiner made clear Tuesday — and must have to do with Obama’s ethnicity.
But even beyond that, some are referring to the signers as the “47 traitors,” as if members of Congress took an oath to obey the president and are now breaking it. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., has repeatedly referred to Cotton as “Tehran Tom” on Twitter, as though the letter had delivered an offer of cooperation with the Iranians rather than a threat to make them stop pressing Obama so hard in negotiations for what he cannot deliver.
Tactically, perhaps Cotton and the others could have addressed Obama in their open letter, instead of the Iranians. But most Republicans and many Democrats are concerned that the president is undermining long-term American interests and allies in these negotiations, trading them away for nothing, when in fact Iran needs the deal far more than America does. And the major point of the letter, that any deal may not outlive the Obama administration, is not seriously in dispute. Even Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged on Wednesday that, “we’re not negotiating a legally binding plan.”
Obama is president and thus the executor of US foreign policy. But there are still limits to his power in that sphere. Binding treaties require a two-thirds ratification vote in the Senate. Wars require bicameral authorization. A president can be forced to sign spending bills that make his preferred policies illegal — or he can even be forced to accept them through a veto-override. Bear in mind that Obama only dropped his opposition to the current regime of sanctions against Iran when it became clear in 2012 that both the House and Senate would pass it almost unanimously, and it would become law whether he supported it or not.
And so despite Obama’s stated intention of hiding the ball from Congress after a deal with Iran is struck, Congress remains part of the United States government. It plays an appropriate role in shaping American foreign policy — a more prominent role, perhaps, when a president, right or wrong, is out of step with the consensus among lawmakers.
During the Bush administration, none other than Hillary Clinton angrily lamented: “I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we’re Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration.”
We agree. The notion that Congress has a patriotic duty to be seen but not heard on Iran is absurd. But it serves at least one purpose, as it illustrates the hypocrisy of those who once proclaimed dissent to be patriotic.
