“A Politician Failing A Test Of Self-Awareness”: Cotton Worries About US Interference In Foreign Negotiations
On the Senate floor yesterday afternoon, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) shared some striking concerns about U.S. foreign policy. He also offered a rather profound example of a politician failing a test of self-awareness.
Earlier in the day, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters that when it comes to the U.S. policy towards Israel, “We’re currently evaluating our approach.” The comments were important, but not surprising – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent antics were bound to carry some consequences.
But Cotton, the right-wing freshman in his second month in the Senate, called Psaki’s comments “worrisome“ – for a very specific reason.
“While Prime Minister Netanyahu won a decisive victory, he still has just started assembling a governing majority coalition. These kinds of quotes from Israel’s most important ally could very well startle some of the smaller parties and their leaders with whom Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently in negotiations.
“This raises the question, of course, if the administration intends to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu’s efforts to assemble a coalition by suggesting a change to our longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s position with the United Nations.”
Hold on a second. Cotton is now concerned about U.S. officials “undermining” foreign officials “currently in negotiations”?
Seriously?
Not to put too fine a point on this, but it was literally just two weeks ago that Cotton took it upon himself to organize a letter to Iran from 47 Senate Republicans. The point of the correspondence, by Cotton’s own admission, was to target international diplomacy, undermine American foreign policy, and disrupt officials during their ongoing negotiations.
I’m going to assume the Arkansas Republican remembers this. It caused a bit of a stir.
And yet, there Cotton was yesterday, expressing concern that a State Department official, simply by stating a simple fact about U.S. foreign policy, might “startle” officials abroad. These officials are “currently in negotiations,” so the GOP senator apparently believes Americans should be cautious not to interfere.
The irony is simply breathtaking. The mind reels.
Update: In his remarks on the Senate floor, Cotton added, “I fear mutual respect is of little concern to this administration. The president and all those senior officials around him should carefully consider the diplomatic and security consequences of their words.”
I mean, really. Is this intended as some kind of performance-art statement on the power of irony?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 20, 2015
“Gimmicky Nature Of The Contingency Fund”: The Intra-GOP Budget Fight Grows Toxic Ahead Of Schedule
At the beginning of a week where action was scheduled to begin on a FY 2016 congressional budget resolution, it looked like Republicans were on the brink of a big split between fiscal hawks in the House who wanted to maintain caps on defense spending negotiated with the Obama administration and/or to require specific cuts in domestic spending to offset adjustments, and defense hawks in the Senate who wanted above all to blow up the defense caps forever and blast them to hell as a first step towards a 1980s-style defense buildup.
Those intra-Republican dynamics remain in place, but the fight has broken out much earlier than expected, in the House itself, and in fact in the House Budget Committee, where Paul Ryan’s successor as chairman, Tom Price of GA, can’t seem to get the votes to report a budget resolution. The Hill‘s Vicki Needham has the arcane story:
Negotiations to resolve a dispute over defense spending blew up Wednesday night in the House Budget Committee, as the panel came up short of approving a nearly $3.8 trillion Republican blueprint.
Budget Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) saw the chances of pushing through an amendment to boost defense spending without offsets fade quickly in the waning hours of a markup of the GOP’s budget proposal, in the latest misstep for House Republicans.
Without a resolution, the Budget panel packed up for the night with Price saying the committee may reconvene Thursday, after even House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) wasn’t able to break the impasse.
House leadership had tested the waters for an amendment from Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) — which would bump up funding to $96 billion for an emergency account earmarked for overseas conflicts without a pay-for — in an effort to attract reluctant defense hawks.
Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and his chief deputy, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), started reaching out to GOP Budget Committee members about whether a proposal to appease defense hawks could pass the panel even before Price kicked off his budget mark-up, according to aides.
Basically, Republicans anticipated trouble on the floor passing a budget resolution that already included a big chunk of change for an off-budget “contingency fund,” and tried to get an extra $20 billion thrown in to placate the defense hawks, but fiscal hawks on the committee–including that highly symbolic freshman, Rep. Dave Brat of VA, the man who slew Eric Cantor–said no.
Meanwhile, outside the hothouse–yes, pun intended–of the lower chamber, defense hawks were already complaining about the gimmicky nature of the contingency fund and are demanding a straight-up major boost in defense spending. Neocon WaPo blogger Jennifer Rubin was shrieking yesterday that the initial House budget resolution represented a “political betrayal” and a “disaster for national security.”
Trouble is, it’s not easy to find a way to accommodate still more defense spending in a budget that already (a) has the aforementioned phony-baloney “contingency fund,” (b) achieves its “balanced budget” targets only via “dynamic scoring” BS and by assuming revenues from implementation of Obamacare even as it proposes to abolish it, (c) proposes partially privatizing Medicare and dumping Medicaid on the states, and (d) stipulates vast but unspecified additional “entitlement” savings outside Social Security and health care.
There’s just no obvious way out of the budgetary math problems the GOP has invented for itself. If Republicans cannot come up with a consensus budget agreement, we’ll have another high-profile example of that party’s inability to govern, and there will also be no way to proceed with the plan to pass a reconciliation bill to repeal Obamacare to show “the base” what Republicans will be able to do once the hated incumbent has left office.
Expect the gimmickry to reach new heights.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 19, 2015
“Talk About A Hot Mess!”: Attempting To Blow Up Hostages Is NOT Governing
Talk about a hot mess! Just try unravelling the lunacy contained in this article by Sarah Mimms. As best as I can understand it, she is suggesting that perhaps Sen. Tom Cotton has come up with a new way for the “conservative firebrands” to blow up hostages in light of the fact that Republican leadership is thwarting their attempts to do so via the legislative process.
Just look at Cotton. His letter criticizing the administration’s attempts to craft a deal with Iran—and his relentless pursuit of signatures from conservative and establishment Republicans—has driven the conversation in the Senate all week and has 2016 candidates clamoring to join his effort. Cotton, with a few mere months under his belt in the upper chamber, arguably holds more power on the issue of Iran right now than Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and, perhaps, even McConnell himself.
Whether he can translate that into legislative victory remains to be seen, but Cotton is creating a model that conservatives hope to follow. But by getting out ahead of the issue, Cotton has forced leadership to include him in the conversation from the start, rather than having to try to outmaneuver the establishment in a floor fight after the fact.
Mimms alludes to previous legislative battles where conservatives tried to shut down the government over funding of Obamacare or deny DHS funding over executive actions on immigration only to eventually be thwarted by Republican leadership’s mastery of the “rules” of the legislature.
But its really not that complicated. Leadership had to amend legislation in a way that attracted enough votes (including Democrats) to actually get passed. That’s called “governing” – something about which those conservative firebrands seem to be completely oblivious.
But this is the paragraph where Mimms really got me scratching my head with a “whuuuu?”
What’s often lost in those fights is that on the biggest issues facing Republicans, conservatives and their leadership are on the same page. The difference is in how and when to fight those battles. If it were possible to gut the Affordable Care Act or overturn Obama’s “executive amnesty,” as conservatives term it, leaders would have done so by now.
She’s right…on most of these issues Republicans are on the same page. But the difference isn’t about “how or when to fight those battles.” It’s that as long as Barack Obama is in the White House and Republicans can’t put together a veto-proof majority to roll back his policies, it can’t be done – not unless you are willing to blow up the hostage. THAT’S the big difference between those she calls “conservatives” and the Republican leadership.
Ever since our founding, politicians have gone to Washington and found it difficult to accomplish their agenda. That’s because our Constitution sets it up that way. Actual governing requires working with the opposition, negotiation and compromise. What Mimms and these conservatives are trying to come up with is a way to avoid all that.
If you are looking for a culprit that could destroy our democracy, you need look no further than those who continue to threaten to blow shit up if they don’t get their way. Sen. Cotton tried to find a new way to do that with the Iranian negotiations. It’s pretty clear by now that he has failed. Rather than cheer him on, those who value our democratic process should be breathing a sigh of relief.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 14, 2015
“The Option Behind Door #3”: McCain, Rand Paul Roll Out New Excuses For Sabotage Letter
After putting his signature on the Senate Republicans’ infamous sabotage letter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) started hedging Tuesday night, saying the GOP’s missive to Iranian leaders may not have been “the best way” for his party to achieve its goals.
By late yesterday, the longtime senator offered an entirely new rationale.
Some Republican senators admitted Wednesday they were caught off guard by the backlash to a letter warning Iranian leaders against a nuclear agreement with President Barack Obama. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Republicans – many of whom blessed the missive during a brisk signing session at a Senate lunch a week ago, as senators prepared to flee a Washington snowstorm – should have given it closer consideration.
“It was kind of a very rapid process. Everybody was looking forward to getting out of town because of the snowstorm,” McCain said.
McCain went on to tell Politico that he and his colleagues “probably should have had more discussion” about the document, “given the blowback that there is.”
Note, this appears to be the third excuse Republicans have come up with for the letter intended to derail American foreign policy. The first rationale was that the 47 GOP senators were kidding, and this was all an attempt at being “cheeky.” The second was that Republicans tried to undermine international nuclear talks, but this is all President Obama’s fault.
And here’s John McCain rolling out the option behind Door #3: Republicans were concerned about snow, so they rushed.
Oddly enough, that’s probably slightly better than the rationale Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) came up with.
On NBC’s “Today” show yesterday morning, the Kentucky Republican told Matt Lauer that he signed on to the sabotage letter because he wanted to “strengthen the president’s hand.”
If there’s a way to see this as a coherent argument, I can’t think of it. Rand Paul thought it would strengthen Obama’s hand at the negotiating table if Republicans told Iranian officials not to trust or cooperate with Obama?
In the larger context, let’s not forget that Republicans tend to consider foreign policy and national security as their signature issues, and polls, reality notwithstanding, generally show Americans trust the GOP more on matters of international affairs. Credibility on foreign policy is generally seen as a birthright throughout the Republican Party.
And yet, consider what we’re seeing from Republican senators right now and the degree to which it’s amateur hour within the GOP.
At a certain level, the fact that so many in the GOP are scrambling to address the scandal they created is itself a heartening sign. All things considered, it’s better to hear Republicans making bizarre excuses than to hear then boast about how proud they are of their sabotage letter. Senators like McCain and Paul aren’t defending the letter on the merits so much as they’re looking for excuses to rationalize their participation in a dangerous stunt.
But I’m nevertheless reminded of Fred Kaplan’s assessment from earlier this week: “It is a useful thing when a political party reveals itself as utterly unsuited for national leadership.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 12, 2015
“Bibi’s U.S. Senatorial Negotiator”: Representing Netanyahu In A Communication With A Hostile Foreign Country
It’s bad enough that Republicans are beginning to treat Bibi Netanyahu as their fantasy President. It’s getting a lot worse when 47 Republican senators basically choose to represent him in a communication with a hostile foreign country with whom our actual president is in sensitive negotiations.
From informal comments I’ve heard elsewhere, I was not alone in reacting to the news of this Republican letter to Iran basically telling them not to rely on any diplomatic commitments from the United State government by thinking: Can they do that? Is there any precedent for this?
I gather the only clear analog was a series of actions taken by Republican senators to undermine European trust in Woodrow Wilson’s position during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So it’s not unprecedented but it’s been a while, and history has not been kind to Wilson’s senatorial tormenters.
It’s depressing to note that of the handful of senators who did not sign this letter three (Alexander, Coats and Cochran) are likely in their final terms, and a fourth (Murkowski) was last elected as a write-in candidate running against the GOP nominee. Whether it’s true or not, the perception among Senate Republicans certainly seems to be that “the base” demands this.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 10, 2015
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