Tom Cotton’s endless war: What his ongoing crusade against the Iran deal says about the GOP
"This single-mindedness makes him either a dangerous ideologue or the Senate’s equivalent of Mr. Magoo, blindly but confidently stumbling from his own little world into reality over and over and over again, without ever being affected in his attitudes and opinions.
Take his famous letter to the leaders of Iran. Back in March, just two months into his first term in the Senate, Cotton convinced 46 of his Republican colleagues to sign one of the most ill-considered diplomatic correspondences since the Zimmerman telegram. In the letter, Cotton helpfully explained to the Iranian mullahs that there was no point in their agreeing to a nuclear arms control agreement with President Obama because any such deal will get tossed in the garbage as soon as a Republican is back in the White House. And indeed, multiple contenders for the GOP nomination for 2016 have promised to tear up the deal their first day in office, which would be more of a concern if any of them had a prayer in hell of being elected.
Cotton’s letter led to widespread condemnation from the White House, Democrats in Congress, even a few Republicans. Some of the Senators who signed it immediately distanced themselves by saying they had read and signed it in haste, which does not exactly inspire confidence in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body but does lead one to wonder what else we could fool these guys into signing. Someone please draft the Free Beer for Life for All Americans Act of 2015 and put it in front of the Senate Republicans, chop-chop.
The letter also led to one of the great moments in, as the kids call it, pwning. When the foreign minister of Iran knows more about how America’s Constitution works than you, an elected representative of America, it’s perhaps incumbent on you to examine your life choices.
Which brings us to this week’s trip to Israel and Cotton’s continued very public attempts to undermine the Obama administration as it works to secure Congressional support for the Iran deal. No one disputes that there is a role for Congress in shaping foreign policy. Although particularly in the decision about whether or not to wage war, it is a role that the legislative branch has ceded to the executive more and more over the last few decades. But there is also an old saw that politics stops at the water’s edge, which legislators have long taken to mean that they will not travel overseas to visibly undercut a president’s policies with the leaders of foreign nations. Like so many of the old political norms, it has long since gone out the window in our highly polarized era. And Tom Cotton is the purest distillation of this conflict, a bathtub of the most blindness-inducing moonshine in the national still."
