Boehner violates the Logan Act

[sr71plt]

Apparently we aren't even addressing the same issue.

 

[mark_j]

Funny how Dems are so "up in arms" about this since they are also guilty of playing the same game.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Funny how Dems are so "up in arms" about this since they are also guilty of playing the same game.

When did the dems do this or anything similar? And I think up in arms is a strong word for the situation. I think mild interest is more accurate.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

Funny how Dems are so "up in arms" about this since they are also guilty of playing the same game.

This is not about "Dems". This is the disloyal opposition overstepping the boundaries and putting the US in a very difficult position, internationally, when nuclear proliferation is at stake. You don't like it? Make it the major plank in the platform in the next presidential election which is right around the corner, don't vote for the treaty on the Senate floor and use every other method available to you - and there are many.

There needs to be a serious accounting for this act.

 

[mark_j]

When did the dems do this or anything similar? And I think up in arms is a strong word for the situation. I think mild interest is more accurate.

Do your research.. I don't think you would have to go very far to find instances where Congresscritters have been messing about in foriegn policy when they have no business doing so.

 

[sr71plt]

Funny how Dems are so "up in arms" about this since they are also guilty of playing the same game.

Yes, please cite when a coalition of Democrats in Congress has tried to conduct foreign policy with a foreign government contrary to the policy of a Republican president--or when a Democratic-controlled Congress has invited a foreign leader to address Congress contrary to the wishes of the sitting Republican president.

 

[cowslinger64]

Do your research.. I don't think you would have to go very far to find instances where Congresscritters have been messing about in foriegn policy when they have no business doing so.

When's the last time ANYONE else invited the PM from a foreign country, without the presidents knowledge, much less approval...and had him come and lecture congress on what our foreign policy needs to be...while they applaud, give standing ovations and fight to suck his dick?

 

[Sean Renaud]

Do your research.. I don't think you would have to go very far to find instances where Congresscritters have been messing about in foriegn policy when they have no business doing so.

It's your research. You made the claim and I kinda doubt something like this happened, certainly not in the Bush years. This thread has been up for several days you can bet that if there was a simple 'but you did it too' to point at that Republicans would have found it and plastered it all over the place by now.

 

[sr71plt]

Do your research.. I don't think you would have to go very far to find instances where Congresscritters have been messing about in foriegn policy when they have no business doing so.

You're making the claim, so it's really up to you to back up your claim.

 

[mark_j]

When did the dems do this or anything similar? And I think up in arms is a strong word for the situation. I think mild interest is more accurate.

This is not about "Dems". This is the disloyal opposition overstepping the boundaries and putting the US in a very difficult position, internationally, when nuclear proliferation is at stake. You don't like it? Make it the major plank in the platform in the next presidential election which is right around the corner, don't vote for the treaty on the Senate floor and use every other method available to you - and there are many.

There needs to be a serious accounting for this act.

You're making the claim, so it's really up to you to back up your claim.

Nancy Pelosi 2007

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/gop-2007-attacks-pelosi-interfering-bushs-syria-policy-v-todays-similar-dem-attacks-iran/

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/30/pelosi.trip/

Jim McDermott 2002

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/737zcgnk.asp

Of course I'm sure all you psycophants will say "But, but, that was different" point is they have ALL done it.

 

[Sean Renaud]

While I think those really ARE different I see how its close enough for people not to make a distinction. I'm all for everybody just walking away and ignoring the whole scenario if you haven't noticed. To me this is one of those cases where what you did might be illegal but. . .yeah. Politically we're better off just doing like Obama did with the investigations into Bush and just say no.

 

[KingOrfeo]

NYT nails it.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Maybe that wasn’t exactly the best way to do that."
-Sen. John McCain

“It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm."
- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)

*gsgs comment- Does that mean that the Republicans that signed the letter, did not. read the letter ?

"I think we probably should have had more discussion about it, given the blowback that there is.”

- Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/...-Snow-is-scarier-than-nuclear-weapons-in-Iran

“Maybe Mr. McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, should have thought about the consequences before he signed the letter."

"...the Republicans in Congress seem to think their role is outside the American government, divorced from constitutional principles, tradition and the security interests of the American people.”

"In rejecting diplomacy, the Republicans make an Iranian bomb and military conflict more likely."

New York Times- "Republican Idiocy on Iran"

*gsgs comment-
Why do Repubicans remind me of children, who are constantly challenging boundaries and limits ? *

 

[BoyNextDoor]

NYT nails it.

Agreed. From the link:

The best and only practical way to restrain Iran from developing a bomb is through negotiating a strict agreement with tough monitoring. In rejecting diplomacy, the Republicans make an Iranian bomb and military conflict more likely.

It is absolutely the agenda of the sitting GOP leadership and their corporate sponsors to follow and instill an American foreign policy that exacerbates existing conflict and promotes new ones.

 

[sr71plt]

It is absolutely the agenda of the sitting GOP leadership and their corporate sponsors to follow and instill an American foreign policy that exacerbates existing conflict and promotes new ones.

I think it's more likely that the agenda doesn't go much further beyond just saying no to anything the Obama administration is trying to do. I don't give the GOP congressional leadership the benefit of the doubt any more on caring about the needs of the nation at all.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

I think it's more likely that the agenda doesn't go much further beyond just saying no to anything the Obama administration is trying to do. I don't give the GOP congressional leadership the benefit of the doubt any more on caring about the needs of the nation at all.

I was going for more of a military-industrial complex sort of POV

 

[sr71plt]

I was going for more of a military-industrial complex sort of POV

Yeah, but I only see one GOP POV going and it's trumping everything else.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Interesting analysis of why this happened.

Constitutions matter, but every political system depends as well on informal norms, a more or less tacit consensus on how things will be done and what kind of behavior is and isn’t acceptable. This is especially true in America, where our constitutional separation of executive and legislature, and extra-constitutional devices like the filibuster, require compromise and cooperation if the government is to function effectively. Political actors must accept the constraints laid down by the rules (formal and informal) that define legitimate behavior, and must trust that others will do so in turn. When this trust lapses, confrontation replaces compromise and the political system lurches into crisis.

There have been three moments in our history when something like this happened. The first arose very early, when anxieties about revolutionary France led the Federalist administration of John Adams to propose a number of measures, including the infamous “Alien and Sedition Acts,” intended to enhance executive authority and to repress domestic dissent. This led the Anti-federalists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to draft a series of resolutions defending the right of states to nullify federal statutes they deemed unconstitutional. Adopted by the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures, these ignited a confrontation between proponents of Federal power and advocates of “states’ rights” that roiled our politics until the Civil War, and beyond.

The second moment, of course, was the Civil War itself. The third is much more recent, extending over at least the Obama presidency but with roots as far back, perhaps, as the Clinton impeachment. It involves the readiness of Republicans to violate long-standing norms of institutional conduct in order to advance a highly divisive, intensely partisan agenda. Impeachment and the threat of impeachment; the use of primaries to defeat Republican incumbents judged to be insufficiently “conservative”; a willingness to default on the debt or shutdown the government; the indiscriminate use of the filibuster to require super-majorities in the Senate on virtually every issue— this pattern of increasingly radical behavior may certainly be associated, in any given case, with the anger or pique of particular politicians. But its deepest source is in the political attitudes of an increasingly radical party.

<snip>

But these two factors [the GOP resigned to being a "Congressional party," and the entrepreneurial career-paths of Pub pols nowadays], important as they are, are not the deepest source of the GOP’s behavior. That is surely the mutation in its idea of government, a mutation that spread through the party as a whole when white Southerners flocked to it after the passage of Civil Rights laws in the mid-1960s. Until that time, the Republican Party, while “conservative” in the spectrum of American politics, largely accepted the modern state constructed by politicians — Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt — of both parties. This state tried to keep private markets free and fair, and imposed minimum standards for the safety and welfare of workers; it sought a stable currency; and it insisted on the equal citizenship of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities. More recently, it worked to extend this status to groups defined variously by gender and/or sexuality.

Republicans might be suspicious of some of these aspirations, and more inclined than Democrats to urge caution and restraint, but in general they regarded the modern state as a necessary compromise with modern life. This began to change in response to the racial and cultural politics of the 1960s. The white Southerners who bolted the Democratic Party for the GOP didn’t view the modern state as a necessity; they saw it as apostasy. It wasn’t a pragmatic compromise with the changed landscape of modernity, but a monstrous conspiracy to replace true American values with a spurious and corrupt humanism. In doing so, it sought to blot out God-given distinctions between the races and the sexes — and between the productive and the unproductive — in the name of an artificial equality that would both require and justify constant Federal intrusion.

<snip>

This is the party of Georgia boy Newt Gingrich, who dismissed Kansas Sen. Robert Dole, an old-school Robert Taft Republican, as “a tax collector for the welfare state.” It’s the party of Tennessee’s Martha Blackburn, a House member who hailed the 2013 government shutdown because it would show Americans “they can live with a lot less government than what they thought they needed.” It’s the party of Joe Wilson, the South Carolina congressman who shouted “You lie!” at President Obama during a 2009 speech, and of former Texas governor Rick Perry, who peppers his speeches with references to secession and “states’ rights.” This Republican Party shows little interest in the norms that have defined American politics because it has only contempt for the state those norms are designed to sustain.

Full of scorn for their own government, the ideologues who control today’s GOP feel free to disregard any limitation on their pursuit of conservative purity. The letter to Iran, and the invitation to Netanyahu, merely enact this principle in the realm of foreign affairs. The real concern of the Tea Party isn’t the modern American state, which it despises, but its own hermetic vision of the conservative “cause”– a cause that transcends national boundaries. Its adherents find it easier to cooperate with the leader of Israel’s Likud Party than with their Democratic colleagues in the American Congress. Tom Cotton’s dispatch to Tehran — or something like it — was the inevitable outcome of the process set in motion by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. We should expect more of the same in the future.

 

[BoyNextDoor]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/traitors-800x430.jpg