Outrage comes in waves

About that letter from the senators

“It’s extraordinary in the sense that this is very unusual. I can’t remember the last time, certainly not in my lifetime, that members of Congress tried— sent a letter to a foreign government pretty openly trying to undermine a sitting president’s negotiations.” So said one commentator—Sahil Kapur on MSNBC—after a letter signed by 47 U.S. senators to the Ayatollah of Iran became last week’s big story.

WELL, MAYBE Mr. Kapur is younger than he sounds or just has a short memory. For there are historical precedents aplenty for American senators unhappy with a president’s foreign policy addressing foreign leaders directly, though not prudently or effectively.

Back in the real world of historical reality, there have been quite a few instances of congressional leaders openly addressing foreign governments in defiance of presidents. But then it was Democratic leaders opposed to a Republican president’s foreign policy, which seems to make all the difference in partisan— and faulty—memories.

Remember when Jim Wright, the Democratic speaker of the House during the Reagan presidency, met with the leaders in Nicaragua’s civil war?

Three Democratic leaders of the House visited Iraq in 2002 just before President George W. Bush’s invasion of that country to express their opposition to the president’s plans.

And the leader of the Democrats in the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi, flew off to Syria in 2007 to meet with its dictator, Bashar al-Assad, much against the wishes of the Bush administration, which was seeking to isolate the Syrian regime at the time.

Then there was the time—1984— when Democrats in Congress fired off a letter supporting Nicaragua’s dictator of the moment, Daniel Ortega.

But today’s Democratic outrage at congressional attempts to directly oppose a president’s foreign policy seems confined to Republican presidents.

Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, who took a leading role in drafting and circulating this letter to Teheran, has come under particularly heavy fire from Democratic partisans. In a throwback to Joe McCarthy’s heyday, slurs like “traitorous” and “mutinous” have been hurled at the freshman senator. Writing in the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore denounced the Republican senators’ letter to Teheran as “sedition in the name of patriotism.” Senator Cotton has been accused of violating the Logan Act of 1799, which prohibited American citizens from negotiating with any foreign power “without the authority of the United States”, and has been long and wisely ignored ever since, violating Americans’ right to free speech as it did.

Barack Obama, our ever coy president, encouraged such smears when he commented: “It’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran.” Hillary Clinton, our wanna-be next president, paused in her bumbling attempts to defend her role in the scandal over her emails private, public and mixed to interject the Republican senators’ letter into her comments: “Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians, or harmful to [a] commander-in-chief in the middle of high-stakes international diplomacy.”

And a Democratic congressman from Colorado, Jared Polis, fired off a tweet referring to Tom Cotton as “Tehran Tom.” While a retired American major general issued a press release saying, “I wouldn’t call Senator Tom Cotton a traitor for penning his letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran [but] I would say his actions were mutinous.”

OF COURSE the U.S. Senate has every constitutional right to express its views about a president’s foreign policy, and the views of these 47 senators would seem well-founded. The problem with the letter they sent the Ayatollah of Iran wasn’t anything it said, but the address. They should have sounded off to the president and the American people in general, not foreign leaders, on this occasion.

As the ever reliable John McCain, one of the letter’s signers, put it after second and better thoughts, “I think we should have had more discussion about it.” At the least.