Who Is Making "Common Cause" With The Iranians?

The Senators who signed the letter to Rouhani were making a Constitutional point, and also one that they felt might help persuade the Iranians to be more forthcoming given that they have already managed to wring so many extraordinhary concessions, though in a position of great and growing economic weakness, from the maladroit American negotiators. They wanted to explain that according to the Constitution, a Treaty, which is binding — and Americans, being non-Muslim Western men, believe in the principle of Pacta Sunt Servanda, “treaties are to be obeyed,” — requires the advise and consent of the Senate, and that since Obama has dismissed the many calls, from Congress, for allowing the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional duty and right, the deal reached will be an Executive Agreement, and can be undone by a future President, perhaps prompted by an unhappy majority of the Senate.

Obama replied, dismissively, ignoring the Constitutional question (strange, isn’t it, given that much was made of his being a “professor” — that is, adjunct lecturer — in Constitutional Law), and observing that “ironically” these Senators were making “common cause” with the “hard-liners in Iran.” But would it not be more accurate to describe the dismissal, by Obama, and Harry Reid, and others, some of whom have become positively apoplectic and hysterical in their remarks, of the Senators’ letter, as scornfully dismissing the letter as Mohammad Javad Zarif did: “In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy.” Isn’t that exactly what those Americans, including the President, have said, and almost in those very words?