That Time the Republicans Told Iran They Were the Boss and Not Obama

It’s like Trump telling Iran he’s the boss, with about the same result.

Photo source: ABC News - 2013

If you think there’s no precedent for Trump’s audacious attempts to boss the other branches around and make all the rules, think again. He learned it from his own peeps, who must now wonder what in hell they were thinking to ever let him see how they did it.

The Republicans had been trying to figure out ways of undermining the very government they’re supposed to be properly running long before they came up with the “Tea Party” moniker to separate themselves from any notion that public servitude and obligations to the people would be at the forefront of their efforts. Even before Ronald Reagan, that slippery, smiley sock puppet who went from liberal Democrat to a willing overseer and huge fan of the very rich and very powerful, they tried to pawn off the idea that ‘conservatism’ meant taking from the poor and giving to the rich, which, for all you ninnies who balked at that, is really quite honorable.

Each time they’ve held the majority, which is any time too often, they’ve worked madly and together to build their power to the extreme. The Democrats, mysteriously forgetting their own power, are always flabbergasted at the audacity, to the point of near fainting. That seems to energize the Republicans, no matter the era. And here we are again, only it’s ten times worse.

But looking back, we should have seen this coming. They were only always going to get worse.

Some of you may remember how they treated Barack Obama when he dared to be president twice in spite of their best efforts to unseat him. That made them so mad! People liked him! He was a star! Nothing they tried could quite dim his light. But they kept trying, and the ridiculous became normal. Maybe not as ridiculous as today, but remember that time they told Iran Obama was merely the president so they should negotiate with the Republicans, instead?

Yeah, it happened and I wrote about it at the time. I published this piece at my blog, Ramona’s Voices, in 2015. Here it is. You might have to see it to believe it:

Not ‘The Onion’: GOP Senators Tell Iran Obama’s Not the Boss, They Are.

First published at Ramona’s Voices, March 10, 2015.

In a stunning open letter to the leaders of Iran, 47 Republican senators let it be known that while Barack Obama might occupy the White House and temporarily hold the title of President and Commander-in-chief of these United States, it is Congress--most especially the Republican Congress--that holds the cards when it comes to any kind of nuclear deal.

The letter--did I mention it was addressed to the leaders of Iran?--was written by Tom Cotton, freshman senator from Arkansas, and signed by all but seven Republicans in the United States Senate.

It began like this:

An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran:

It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution — the power to make binding international agreements and the different character of federal offices — which you should seriously consider as negotiations progress.

Does that paragraph seem a little strange to you? Who, outside of Monty Python, or maybe your local HOA, writes, “It has come to our attention. . .”?

Who, besides a newbie Tea Party senator (or a hotshot American Constitution 101 student) thinks it’s a good idea to publicly school the leaders of another country about the laws of the United States?

Who, for that matter, writes an open letter to leaders of a country with which we’re negotiating nuclear agreements, telling them they shouldn’t be negotiating anything with this particular president when it’s this particular congress that will ultimately have to approve?

From the letter: “For example, the president may serve only two 4-year terms, whereas senators may serve an unlimited number of 6-year terms. As applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then — perhaps decades.

“What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

(Who writes this without knowing that congress only approves and does not ratify a treaty?)

“First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them. In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote. A so-called congressional-executive agreement requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate (which, because of procedural rules, effectively means a three-fifths vote in the Senate). Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement.”

Who does that without knowing that it’s not just our country in negotiations with Iran, but a UN coalition made up of five other countries--the UK, Russia, China, France and Germany?

Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, did his own schooling yesterday:

“I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law.

The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfill the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations.

I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement ‘with the stroke of a pen’, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law.”

So how did Tom Cotton get 46 other senators, many of them senior senators and wannabe presidential candidates, to sign their names at the bottom of that misdirected, miscalculated, misinformed mess?

I can hardly wait to hear from the signers--the ones who woke up this morning, as if from a hangover, thinking, “What in hell? Where am I? What did I do?”

The seven Republican senators who didn’t sign:
1. Flake (AZ)
2. Collins (ME)
3. Corker (TN)
4. Murkowski (AK)
5. Alexander (TN)
6. Coats (IN)
7. Cochran (MS)

And, man, oh, man, (Got that from Biden) didn’t the shit hit the fan? It did. In great steaming gobs. So many are responding at so many different sources, it’s impossible, even at this early stage, to link to them all.

Bernie Sanders accused the signers of sabotage. And Joe Biden said this:

“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,” Biden wrote. “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.”

To which Tom Cotton, the author of the now infamous letter, who, at this writing, has no foreign policy or national security experience whatsoever, responded:

“Joe Biden, as [President] Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense has said, has been wrong about nearly every foreign policy and national security decision in the last 40 years,” Cotton said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” in a reference to former Pentagon chief Robert Gates, who ripped Biden in a tell-all memoir after leaving office.

And on it goes. There is no end to the disrespect and outright hatred for this president. The caterwauling against him raises by a thousand decibels each year he is in office. The haters, including those members of congress who have made it their mission to take him down by any means necessary, aren’t finished yet. If this doesn’t work--and it won’t--they’ll move on to something else.

It’s worth noting that this all came down on the same weekend the country was recognizing the sacrifices made by the Civil Rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge 50 years ago in Selma, Alabama. On Saturday, the same day the Open Letter to the Islamic Leaders of Iran became public, our president, Barack Obama, gave the speech of his life at the entrance of the “Bloody Sunday” bridge.

In his speech President Obama said,

“The Americans who crossed this bridge were not physically imposing. But they gave courage to millions. They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, and countless daily indignities – but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before.

What they did here will reverberate through the ages. Not because the change they won was preordained; not because their victory was complete; but because they proved that nonviolent change is possible; that love and hope can conquer hate.”

And this is why the haters, even those members of congress who will never give this president the legitimacy he deserves, will lose. We’ve made too many sacrifices in too many places at too many times to give in and give up and let them win.

So ends the piece from 2015. Looking back I see that over those 12 years Ramona’s Voices ran, I managed to catch those Republicans many times with their pants down. This piece and others like it will be published in a book of essays sometime this year. If you want to ride along with me, I’ll ask you to subscribe so we can take them on together in all the ways we can. And if you can see your way to supporting me by paying for your subscription, I would find that just amazing.

Here is some further reading, just because they’re really so, so bad and we’re always trying to make them better.

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