The 47 traitors in the Senate remind me so much of Fredo, the iconically pathetic weak link of the Corleone Family in The Godfather. As you may recall, Fredo was pretty much useless in New York, so they sent him out west to 'learn the casino business', to get him out of the way. When youngest son Michael Corleone ascends to power (over the older Fredo, never in the running), Michael goes out to Las Vegas to buy out 'Moe' Greene's casino empire. As Michael and Moe Greene slash and burn in negotiations, Fredo takes Moe Greene's side. Trying to undermine Michael's bargaining authority, Fredo pleas to consigliere Tom Hagen that they should talk to the retired Don Vito. Moe Greene knows he's a dead man, but for a wishful moment, he looks to hapless Fredo, then leaves the room to get his affairs in order and await a bullet.
Later, Fredo is duped by Michael's enemies into abetting an attempt on Michael's life. Here's Fredo, confronted by Michael, slumped in a chair, confessing his pathetic treachery. Look at the body language:
I see the 47 traitors slumped in that chair -- dysfunctional, ineffectual, willing to betray America to get a respect they don't deserve. I have little respect for the Fredo Congress, the House of Dysfunction, the Shutdown Congress. They have looked typically ridiculous in past weeks:
(1) 'Chronic' John Boehner's botched protocol of Netanyahu's speech.
(2) The DHS funding farce, itself a side effect of their (3) inability to pass an immigration bill.
(4) Mitch McConnell clumsily trying to cash in on Netanyahu's speech by rushing an Iran sanctions bill to the floor the day after, bypassing the committee process, which only had the result of losing bipartisan support for the bill. Facing filibuster and certain veto, McConnell fails and postpones his bill. Look out below:
Deja Not
Michael Crowley argues the letter by the 47 traitors is not unprecedented, citing examples of Congressional interference with a President's foreign policy, such as passage of the 1987 Boland Amendment (short-circuiting Reagan Nicaragua Contra policy) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 2007 visit to Syria. But these are abstract comparisons that ignore the core essence of the letter by 47 traitors. The core essence of the letter is the chronic dysfunction of the Do Nothing Congress.
The 47 traitors and the Boland Amendment are not at all the same. The Boland Amendment was an Act of Congress, passed by a majority of Congress. The 47 traitors are not a majority. Their letter is not an Act of Congress. There was no vote on it. It wouldn't have passed.
In fact, the 47 traitors only sent the letter because McConnell could not muster the votes to pass an Iran sanctions bill, having typically screwed up a possibly veto-proof bipartisan majority by playing partisan pattycake with Netanyahu. Thus, the letter of the 47 traitors is a function of GOP dysfunction. In essence, it says only this: "We can't pass a bill so we'll send a letter." It's their Declaration of Dysfunction.
It's Congressional masturbation. You don't need a date to masturbate, and you don't need to whip votes to send a letter. The GOP is just playing with itself.
As for Speaker Pelosi, the right wing can only wish she were as ineffectual as the Do Nothing Congress. For Pelosi certainly Did Something. She passed Obamacare and credit card reform. The right is still having fits over her actions.
So Crowley's argument, that equates Acts of a functioning Congress to a masturbatory non-act by a non-functioning Senate, is like saying blue is the same as yellow because, in the abstract, they are both colors.
Yes, it is Treason
Getting back to Fredo, why did the 47 traitors try to betray the Commander-in-Chief? Because they want respect, like Fredo did. Frontman/patsy Senator Cotton says, "if Joe Biden respects the dignity of the institution of the Senate he should be insisting that the president submit any deal to approval of the Senate."
Submit it to the Senate so they can malfunction? Or to paraphrase a la Fredo: "We're not ridiculous like everybody in the world thinks. We can handle things, and we want respect!" They holler about the President's Executive Actions and Executive Agreements, leaving them out. "We were stepped over!" Yes, when the President sees this smelly drunk of a Congress passed out in the gutter of its own dysfunction, he steps over it. When he asks them to pass an immigration bill, but they don't and clearly can't, he takes Executive Action.
The Do Nothings scream about checks and balances. But again, they escape into abstraction. It's abstract make-believe to speak of the Shutdown Congress as if it were a functioning branch in our Constitutional framework. The Constitution provides for a President who cannot serve. It provides quorum rules if a number of Congresspersons are absent. But what if Congress as a whole is incapacitated by malfunction?
This Congress can't function in foreign policy because they can't function in anything. I'd argue that their dysfunction is treasonous. They undermine the Constitution by leaving us without a legislative branch, for all intents. And since they can't function, the 47 traitors try to paralyze the Executive to achieve a "balance of impotence," rather than a balance of powers.
Fortunately, they are too dysfunctional to achieve a balance of dysfunction: Iran just laughed at them. The letter of the 47 traitors is legally meaningless.
But their intention is subversive. Maybe Obama is trying to put one over on Iran, like he did on Putin. Suppose a Senator had revealed U.S. fallback positions to the Soviet Union in the SALT talks? Suppose "Tricky Dick" Nixon was tricking the Soviets in the fine print of SALT, and a Senator advised the Soviets of the booby trap? That's treason.
Republicans in Congress have embarrassed themselves ever since the shutdown. Before, when they became the clown face of the U.S., S&P downgraded our national credit rating. Now they want to discredit the nation again, by putting Fredo's face on American foreign policy. Yes, it is treason for Senators to misrepresent the United States as disorganized, dysfunctional, and paralyzed in the international arena.