Senator Tom Cotton (R – Ark.), Harvard grad and former soldier (tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, awarded Bronze Star) recently recruited 46 other Senators in signing a letter to Iran’s leaders, informing them that any deal Iran makes with the Obama administration regarding when, if, how, Iran becomes a nuclear power is not binding unless approved by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, as the Constitution requires. Without that approval any deal is merely an “executive agreement,” which can be unilaterally overturned by President Obama’s successor.
And the howling began. The New York Daily News called the 47 senators “traitors.” Secretary of State John Kerry said it “ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy.” Liberal blogger Max Fisher claimed this obstructed “the previously sacrosanct realm of foreign policy.”
Leave aside the fact that Democrats have a long history of obstructing Republican foreign policy. When President Ford was negotiating the SALT II treaty with the Soviet Union in 1979, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd traveled to Moscow to “personally explain the requirements of our Constitution to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev.” When President Reagan tried to contain the Communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, then-Senator John Kerry met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, to attempt to undermine Reagan’s efforts. Jimmy Carter secretly wrote members of the U.N. Security Council asking them to oppose a U.N. resolution proposed by his own country, which an infuriated President George H.W. Bush later called “ a deliberate attempt to undermine” his foreign policy.
That hypocrisy aside, let’s focus on the contention of the Obama administration and Iran’s leaders that if the U.N. Security Council signs off on the agreement, which they expect its members (U.S., France, Britain, Russia, China, plus Germany) will do, then the United States must accept it because in ratifying the U.N. Charter, America agreed to abide by U.N. Security Council resolutions.
Except that in all but rare cases — this isn’t one of them — international agreements are treaties and must adhere to the Constitution first, not international bodies, and that Constitution (Article II, Sec. 2) only gives the president the power to “make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senate concur … ”
It’s bad enough that President Obama is attempting to give treaty-approval authority to the U.N. Security Council — an international body that includes two nations, Russian and China, hostile to America — when, according to the U.S. Constitution, that authority properly belongs to a domestic body, the U.S. Senate. But he is doing so in order to forge an agreement with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, with which we don’t even have diplomatic relations, which will almost certainly lead to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by that terrorist state.
