Tag Archives: foreign policy

It’s Their Job

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Iranian President Hasan Rouhani doesn’t like it that in a republican democracy, legislatures, representing the plebes, get a say in what the republican democratic government does internationally—including agreeing to treaties and Executive Agreements. From this, he “accused” Congress of “meddling in sensitive negotiations” about Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

What the US Senate says, or what the US House of Representatives want, or what the extremists in the US are looking for, or what the US mercenaries in the region say, it doesn’t have anything to do with our government or our people…. We announce that the side that we deal with is not the US Senate or the House of Representatives—it is a group called the P5+1[.]

However, this thing has everything to do with our government and our people—us Americans on the other side of this…negotiation. And so Congress is obligated to say, to want, to look for.

Rouhani probably wants to (re)read the letter 47 of those US Senators sent him a bit ago.

Naturally

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The board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has decided to continue accepting donations from foreign governments, primarily from six countries, even though Hillary Clinton is running for president….

Other governments will be encouraged to contribute to the Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, carefully ignoring the fungibility of money.

Corporate campaign money is bad. But foreign government…money is good. She will, after all, be dealing with those foreign governments as peers (in every sense of that word) if she’s elected, not those corporations.

Oh, and the evils of corporate campaign money? That’s for the little people. Clinton’s campaign organizations, PACs, etc are expected to raise $1-$2 billion this campaign season.

Of Course

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Fighting raged overnight [Tuesday night] and in the early hours on Tuesday on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine despite an agreement reached by the Ukrainian and Russian foreign ministers a day earlier.

And a significant fraction of the rebel troops in the fight are Russian Green Men.

Russia wants Ukraine back in the Russian empire. Full stop.

Whatever Happened

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…to the plaint that Congress’ bill asserting its capacity to approve or disapprove Obama’s coming Executive Agreement with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program would fatally imperil those negotiations?

Now the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, is saying

Yesterday there was a compromise reached in Washington regarding congressional input. We are confident about our ability for the president to negotiate an agreement, and to do so with the ability to make the world safer.

The only change of substance was to withdraw a requirement that President Barack Obama certify every 90 days that Iran was not supporting terrorist organizations anymore.

But the bill no longer imperils negotiations? It never did, of course, that was just Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to anything Republican. The true change, if change it was, was the bill’s passage out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and onto the Senate floor by a unanimous 19-0 vote.

The 10th Amendment

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Here’s an example of the 10th Amendment in action:

While the United States and Iran edge closer to a nuclear deal, nearly two dozen US states are imposing their own sanctions against Tehran—a move some say could derail fragile talks between the two countries.

The states, though, say they aren’t budging. In fact, Kansas and Mississippi are even considering adding more sanctions.

And

Several states across the country have put their own measures in place to punish Iran-linked companies operating in certain sectors of its economy, directing public pension funds with billions of dollars in assets to divesting from the firms and sometimes barring them from public contracts[.]

Other states doing this sort of thing include Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Oregon, among others.

Would that the White House had similarly capable judgment.