Politics USA reports:

47 GOP Senators signed an open letter to Iran’s leaders, warning them that Republicans were prepared to undermine any nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the United States. The letter was the brainchild of freshman Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) also signed the letter. The letter basically argues that Iran should not trust any agreement with the United States because that deal could be undone at any time.

The letter concludes with the warning:

…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 an agreement at any time.

We hope this letter enriches your knowledge of our constitutional system and promotes mutual understanding and clarity as nuclear negotiations progress.

 

The horror! Except that Reason reports about the traitorous Joe Biden:

The letter, Biden charged, is “expressly designed to undercut a sitting President in the midst of sensitive international negotiations,” and “beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.” It also “threatens to undermine the ability of any future American President, whether Democrat or Republican, to negotiate with other nations on behalf of the United States.”

You would think from the tenor of his criticism that Biden had been deferential to presidential prerogatives on foreign policy during his many decades in the United States Senate. And you would be dead wrong.

On July 22, 1986, after a season of nationwide anti-apartheid protests on college campuses and serial debate over economic sanctions in Washington, Reagan gave a speech that both condemned South Africa’s institutional racism (“Apartheid must be dismantled,” was one of many such quotes), and rejected sanctions as “immoral and utterly repugnant” because they would hurt the people most in need of help. The next day, Secretary of State George Shulz testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Subsequent newspaper accounts of the ensuing verbal carnage would be given headlines such as “Shultz couldn’t duck ‘Fiery Joe’ Biden.”

I can’t find video of Sen. Biden’s table-pounding performance, but here are some quotes as recorded by the political journalist Jules Witcover:

“We ask them to put up a timetable,” he thundered, waiving a fist. “What is our timetable? Where do we stand morally? I hate to hear an administration and a secretary of state refusing to act on a morally abhorrent point. I’m ashamed of this country that puts out a policy like this that says nothing, nothing. I’m ashamed of the lack of moral backbone to this policy.”

More reported quotes from the harangue here and here. The New York Times used the occasion of Biden’s angry foreign-policy dissent to write a feature on how the Delawarian “has emerged as an aggressive presence on the Washington stage.”

Newsbusters adds:

On Monday, The New York Times pointed out three such instances:

Jim Wright, the Democratic House speaker during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was accused of interfering when he met with opposing leaders in Nicaragua’s contra war. Three House Democrats went to Iraq in 2002 before President George W. Bush’s invasion to try to head off war. And Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, went to Syria in 2007 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad against the wishes of the Bush administration, which was trying to isolate him.

In 1984, congressional Democrats sent a letter to Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortego Saavedra.

Perhaps the most outlandish incident of a congressional Democrat reaching out to a foreign power was Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1983 letter to the Soviet Union in an attempt to undermine President Ronald Reagan’s nuclear arms negotiations with the Communist regime.

Perhaps it is unprecedented for Republicans to circumvent a Democratic president’s wrongheaded foreign policy approach. It is not unprecedented for Democrats to try to subvert a Republican president’s foreign policy.

Cotton, meanwhile, has this response, reported by the Washington Examiner:

Sen. Tom Cotton challenged Vice President Joe Biden’s criticism of the GOP’s letter to Iran, questioning his foreign policy expertise.

“Joe Biden, as [President] Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense has said, has been wrong about nearly every foreign policy and national security decision in the last 40 years,” the Arkansas Republican said Tuesday on MSNBC.

“Moreover, 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, which is exactly what he did on numerous deals during his time in Senate,” Cotton said.

Similar to the supposed breach of protocol when Republicans invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress, there is only one important question: Who is correct? It is certainly not Obama, who appears ready to sell both Israel and this country down the river for his eagerness to make a bad deal with one of our enemies.