GOP ‘traitors’ work to derail president from oil pipeline to Iran

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Editor- | Last updated: Mar 19, 2015 - 3:58:10 PM

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - For the fourth time in as many attempts since winning majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, on March 10 Republicans failed to either change the course of public policy, or to swing public opinion in favor of their political goals.

Their first defeat came when the two chambers tried to force approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline with legislation demanding that it be built. President Barack Obama vetoed the bill and the Senate failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto. The president says the pipeline proposal is still under review and will be decided once the State Department’s studies of the proposal’s environmental impact is complete.

Then, after clamoring about the president’s decision to ease immigration enforcement and deportations of many of the 11 million undocumented persons living here, ultra-conservative House Republicans attached language to the funding appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security which would have restricted the administration’s ability to enforce the changes made in Mr. Obama’s sweeping executive order.

Senate Democrats blocked a similar provision in their version of the bill. After a standoff in which the critical agency averted a shutdown with a one-week emergency extension, the House Republican Caucus relented, allowing the Senate’s “clean bill” to be voted on, and eventually passed with the votes of all the House Democrats, but only a handful of the GOP.

Next, House Speaker John Boehner secretly arranged for a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress in which the foreign leader criticized U.S. foreign policy which involves five other major world powers negotiating with Iran to limit that country’s future nuclear development. That speech was just two weeks before Israeli elections. Approximately 60 Senators and House members boycotted the speech which politicized U.S.-Israeli relations and may have backfired on both the congressional leaders and the Israeli prime minister.

The latest defeat in the GOP efforts to demonstrate their ability to make the government operate more efficiently, came with a humiliating rebuke from the president, Vice President Joseph Biden, international leaders and hundreds of thousands of Americans who signed an online petition to impeach the responsible Republicans.

A group of 47 Republican senators released an open letter to Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in another bid to disrupt the Obama administration’s attempts at a nuclear deal. The letter was spearheaded by freshman Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton and signed by a number of potential 2016 presidential hopefuls, including Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

“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 letter, which is unprecedented in U.S. diplomatic history, and possibly even a violation of the U.S. constitutional authority of the president to conduct foreign policy, read in part.

“I think it’s somewhat ironic to see some members of Congress wanting to make common cause with the hardliners in Iran,” President Obama told reporters after the letter’s release. “It’s an unusual coalition. I think what we’re going to focus on right now is actually seeing whether we can get a deal or not. And once we do, then we’ll—if we do, then we’ll be able to make the case to the American people, and I’m confident we’ll be able to implement it.”

In a lengthy and harshly worded statement, Vice President Biden, a Senate veteran of more than 30 years and a former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he could not recall any time when senators had written to the leaders of another country, “much less a foreign adversary,” to say the president had no authority to strike a deal with them.

“This letter, in the guise of a constitutional lesson, ignores two centuries of precedent and threatens to undermine the ability of any future American president, whether Democrat or Republican, to negotiate with other nations on behalf of the United States,” Mr. Biden said. “Honorable people can disagree over policy. But this is no way to make America safer or stronger.” The tactic at best embarrasses this country, critics complained. At worst it “flirts with treason.”

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, dismissed the letter. “In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy,” he said in a statement. “It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also weighed in on the controversy. “The recent letter from Republican senators was out of step with the best traditions of American leadership,” she said at a press conference. “And one has to ask: What was the purpose of this letter? There appear to be two logical answers. Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the commander-in-chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy. Either answer does discredit to the letters’ signatories.”

Other critics of the letter complain that the 47 GOP senators who signed it appear to hate their own president, and the prospect of his claiming success, than they hate the idea of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, because it makes a successful negotiation more difficult.

At least 22 major newspapers all across the country condemned the letter writers. “America’s partners in the talks are among the world’s most important nations—China, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom,” said the editorial board of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “They can only be appalled at seeing Secretary of State John Kerry and the president, who are charged with making the nation’s foreign policy, hit from behind by one house of the federal legislature. The senators who signed the letter should be ashamed.”

The Baltimore Sun was even blunter. “The poison pen note was a shocking example of just how far President Barack Obama’s GOP critics in Congress are willing to go in an effort to undercut his foreign policy goals … The GOP senators might just as well have put up a big sign over their chamber warning the mullahs in Tehran to prepare for war because that’s the practical import of rejecting any possibility of a negotiated resolution of the two countries’ differences.”

The influential Israeli lobby is accused of prompting neophyte Sen. Cotton (R-Ark.) to organize the letter. According to Dylan Williams with the liberal Jewish lobby group “J Street,” neo-conservative pundit Bill Kristol is responsible. “Who gave @SenTomCotton & others the awful idea for the Iran letter? Seems like Sarah Palin-for-VP-level bad advice doesn’t it @BillKristol?” Mr. Williams posted on Twitter, according to Phillip Weiss, who authors the blog “Mondoweiss.”

“There’s a reason for Williams’s suspicion,” Mr. Weiss wrote. “Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel gave Tom Cotton nearly $1 million in his race for the Senate just five months ago, Eli Clifton reported. ‘Cotton received $960,250 in supportive campaign advertising in the last month.’ ” The report of the $1 million contribution was also confirmed by the website Lobe Log.

In addition, “The Intercept” reports Sen. Cotton was set to appear at a secretive meeting of weapons contractors one day after sending the letter, this according to “Democracy Now!”

Now, more than a quarter of a million Americans want treason charges against the 47 Republican senators. A whitehouse.gov petition, filed the day after the letter became known publicly, had more than 235,000 signatures two and a half days later. The White House must respond to any petition that gets 100,000 signatures within 30 days.

The petition is calling for treason charges to be filed against the 47 Republican senators who signed the letter to Iran’s leaders. Though the word “traitor” doesn’t appear anywhere in the official petition, “#47Traitors” was trending on Twitter when word of the petition went viral. The petition pushes that the 47 lawmakers can be charged under the Logan Act, a 1799 law that forbids unauthorized citizens—in this case, the senators—from negotiating with foreign governments. The law, however, is out of date and likely would not be applicable in court, according to the New York Times.

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