Was the GOP's Iran letter really unprecedented?
From Reagan to Clinton, both Democrats and Republicans have tried to sabotage the other party’s foreign policy.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
3/10/15 1:27 PM EDT
The senator was outraged. Congress had challenged the foreign policy of the president, ignoring that he is “the sole person to whom our Constitution gives the responsibility for conducting foreign relations.”
It was “an unconstitutional encroachment on the presidential prerogatives and power,” he fumed.
The words may sound like they come from a Capitol Hill Democrat, reacting to the Senate Republican letter to Iran’s leaders about their nuclear talks with President Obama. On Monday, Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement that those lawmakers were attempting to “undercut our President and circumvent our constitutional system.”
In fact, the angry speaker was Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah — reacting in 1987 to Congress’s passage of the Boland Amendment, cutting off U.S. aid to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels against the vehement wishes of President Ronald Reagan. (Some of those aides would ignore the ban, later producing the Iran-Contra scandal).
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/gop-iran-letter-115943.html#ixzz3U0QVRLDN
Unlike today's republicans, those democrats had some backbone.