Professor Richardson summarizes bad Congressional behavior – abrogations of the Constitution, eh wot – over the last few years:
The Constitution establishes that the executive branch manages foreign affairs, and until 2015 it was an established practice that politics stopped at the water’s edge, meaning that Congress quarreled with the administration at home but the two presented a united front in foreign affairs. That practice ended in March 2015, when 47 Republican senators, led by freshman Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, wrote a letter to Iran’s leaders warning that they would not honor any agreement Iran reached with the Obama administration over its development of nuclear weapons. …
Now extremists in the House are trying to run foreign policy on their own. The costs of that usurpation of power are clear in Niger, formerly a key U.S. ally in the counterterrorism effort in West Africa. The new prime minister of Niger, Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, whose party took power after a coup d’état threw out Niger’s democratically elected president, defended his country’s turn away from the U.S. and toward Russia in an interview with Rachel Chason of the Washington Post. Recalling the House’s six month delay in passing the national security supplemental bill, he said: “We have seen what the United States will do to defend its allies, because we have seen Ukraine and Israel.”
In direct contravention of the wishes of the American electorate.
But it seems to me that the Senate should pass a resolution reprimanding the House for wasting its time outside of its lane. Let Johnson know that he’s a bad boy. Sure, there’s no official status. But deliver it to the House ceremonially. Let the press know ahead of time. The People’s House needs to be reminded that they have no particular expertise in foreign affairs.
That’s what we hired Biden to do.
