Vice President Biden
In thirty-six years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country -- much less a longtime foreign adversary -- that the President does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them. This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that that our Commander-in-Chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments -- a message that is as false as it is dangerous.
The decision to undercut our President and circumvent our constitutional system offends me as a matter of principle. As a matter of policy, the letter and its authors have also offered no viable alternative to the diplomatic resolution with Iran that their letter seeks to undermine. (our emphasis)The New York Daily News (click on image to enlarge)
That's Republican Senators (l. to r.) McConnell, Cruz, Cotton and Paul in the picture above, all signees of the letter to the ayatollahs.
Charles P. Pierce
Cotton stands revealed as a true fanatic. He's stalwart in his convictions as regards things about which he knows exactly dick. What he and practically every Republican in the Senate did was nothing short of a slow-motion, partial coup d'etat. It was not quite treason, and it was not quite a violation of the Logan Act, no matter how dearly some of us might wish it was. (Imagine the howls if the Justice Department actually inquired into that possibility, which it certainly has a right to do. Lindsey Graham might never rise from the fainting couch.) But it stands in history with Richard Nixon's grotesque sabotage of the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 and with whatever it was that the Reagan campaign did to monkeywrench the possible release of the American hostages from their captivity in Iran in 1980. It is an act of unconscionable and perilous presumption, reckless at its base and heedless of eventual consequences. Nobody elected Tom Cotton or the rest of these clowns to undermine the ability of this president to conduct foreign policy. (Nobody elected Bibi Netanyahu to do it, either, as sad as this might make Jen Rubin.) It long has been acceptable on the respectable American right to call this president practically anything. It now is acceptable on the respectable American right to do anything to thwart his ability to conduct his office. A twice-elected president must bow to the uneducated whims of the representative of 478,819 Arkansans. We have fallen through the looking glass and left it far behind. (our emphasis)Sens. Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein
“This is not a time to undermine our commander in chief purely out of spite,” Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday afternoon in an impassioned 10-minute speech attacking the Republican intervention. “We should always have robust debate about foreign policy, but it’s unprecedented for one political party to directly intervene in an international negotiation with the sole goal of embarrassing the president of the United States.”
Other Democrats agreed. “This letter only serves one purpose — to destroy an ongoing negotiation to reach a diplomatic agreement in its closing days,” said Sen Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. (our emphasis)Like perhaps no other episode in recent memory, this extraconstitutional gambit by Republican loons should prove beyond any doubt that, when it comes to matters foreign and domestic, this is a party that places its own interests over that of the United States. Even if the Beltway Villagers and "mainstream media" were not obsessed with the shiny object of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, they undoubtedly would still find reasons not to shame these cynical cornpone crackpots for what they're doing, and have been doing for the past 6 years. History will have to do it for them.
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