Great read and the hypocrisy from both sides is stupendous!
For their part, Democrats, needless to say, thought it was perfectly legitimate for members of Congress to act in opposition to Bush’s foreign policy. In Salon, Joe Conason mocked “the screaming critics of the speaker [who] charge her with undermining presidential power [and] freelancing Mideast diplomacy,” insisting that “those furious complaints were all false and, more important, beside the point.” He said that Republicans “can only smear those who, like Speaker Pelosi, are attempting to promote a bipartisan alternative” and concluded: “Let us hope she possesses the courage to continue that crucial mission.”
There are distinctions between Pelosi’s Assad meeting and the GOP letter to Iran. One Republican accompanied Pelosi; other Republicans had previously visited Assad; the Bipartisan Study Group and State Department had specifically recommended such trips; and at least publicly, Pelosi was insisting (albeit unconvincingly) that there were no real differences between her policy views and the administration’s. Moreover, as House Speaker, she was third in line to the presidency after the vice president, giving her modestly more claim to act in the foreign policy realm than, say, random members of Congress.
Still, the reason I so vividly remember the 2007 controversy over the Pelosi trip is because it was part of this constant Bush-era effort to demand that the president was the sole authority on foreign policy, and that attempts by members of Congress to “interfere” with his actions were illegitimate, possibly illegal, and likely treasonous, because few things are worse than, as Joe Lieberman put it, undermining the Commander-in-Chief (and just by the way, if you’re a citizen who is not in the military, the president is not your “Commander-in-Chief”). In 2007, Lieberman accused Democratic Senators opposing Bush’s Iraq policy of “giv[ing] the enemy some comfort.” Republicans constantly insisted (except when the president is a Democrat) that there was only one proper foreign policy leader — the Commander-in-Chief — not 535 of them, and that interfering with his foreign policy and diplomatic authority was unconstitutional and subversive.
That mentality and rhetoric are no less offensive when used by Democrats today than it was when it was being spewed by Republicans for the entire Bush presidency. And the “treason” rhetoric now being spouted by Democrats is part of a broader embrace by many of them in the Obama era of the worst rhetorical excesses of Bush-era Republicans.
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