Republican Senators Channel Nixon

Just when you thought they couldn't sink any lower, the members of the Republican  majority go and prove you wrong.

Last week it was Boehner having Netanyahu speak to a joint session of Congress to undermine President Obama's negotiations with Iran, but now the Republicans in the Senate have topped him.

Monday 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to the president of Iran again seeking to undermine the nuclear weapon negotiations by means of a veiled threat to refuse to ratify any treaty reached by the parties, and to rescind any executive action Obama may take to implement an agreement.

Their letter says, in part:

First, under our Constitution, while the president negotiates international agreements, Congress plays the significant role of ratifying them.  In the case of a treaty, the Senate must ratify it by a two-thirds vote.  . . .
 Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement.

What these two constitutional provisions mean is that we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei.  The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.

Sadly, this repeats a pattern the Republican Party has been guilty of before. In 1968, when he feared that Hubert Humphrey might seize victory from the jaws of electoral defeat, Richard Nixon dispatched Anna Chennault to South Vietnam to encourage them to block any possible negotiation in the Paris peace talks, promising a better deal if he was elected. Nixon's sabotaging of the peace talks may have extended the war for another five years, at a cost of untold tens of thousands of lives.

Once again, the Republicans have chosen to put their partisan interests ahead of the national security of the United States. If they are successful, the product of their betrayal will be the defeat of the nuclear weapons talks, the immediate resumption of nuclear weapons development by the Iranian government, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran within a few years.

Boehner, McCain, Orrin Hatch, and most of the Republican extremists in the Senate (along with so-called moderates like Kelly Ayotte) seem intent on a 2015 version of the October Surprise plot of 1968.

Have you ever seen anything more contemptible?