Indict The Bitch
April 10, 2007
7:52 AM CST
It has been a long time since I read such wrong-headed thinking, especially from someone whose opinion I normally respect. Andrew McCarthy sets out the case against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thus:
Let’s be clear from the start: There isn’t much question that Speaker Pelosi has committed a felony violation of the Logan Act. This two-century-old law, codified at Section 953 of the federal penal code, bars Americans who are “without authority of the United States” from conducting relations “with any foreign government in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States[.]”
It is settled beyond peradventure that the authority of the United States over the conduct of foreign relations rests exclusively with the executive branch. As John Marshall, later to become the nation’s most important Chief Justice, famously observed, “The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external affairs, and its sole representative with foreign nations. The [executive] department is entrusted with the whole foreign intercourse of the nation.” In 1936, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged in its Curtiss-Wright Export decision, the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations[.]” And, as convincingly explained in the Wall Street Journal by the eminent Professor Robert F. Turner, the congressional debate over passage of the Logan Act demonstrates that the law was understood to bar legislative interference with the president’s management of American diplomacy.
So the Bush administration is in charge of foreign relations. It has a policy of attempting to isolate the rogue Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. Far from authorizing Speaker Pelosi’s visit with Assad, the president asked her not to go. Pelosi went anyway, and proceeded to embarrass herself and our nation by meddling ineptly in the Syrian/Israeli conflict, concurrently giving the despicable Assad just the lifeline our policy has sought to deny him. As the Logan Act goes, it doesn’t get more black-and-white than that.
So Pelosi broke the law. Should she be charged with a felony?
Of course she should. That’s why laws exist: to prevent people from doing stupid and unlawful things. In in the case of the Logan Act, this law exists precisely to prevent the kind of subversion which Pelosi engaged in: the undermining of the foreign policy of the United States. As an act of unspeakable arrogance, this one takes a lot of beating.
What’s the point of having laws at all, if they’re going to be applied unequally? (There’s a side issue: if Newt Gingrich had done a similar misdeed when he was Speaker and Clinton was President, say, during the undeclared war in Yugoslavia, does anyone think that AG Janet Reno’s Justice Department would have hesitated to prosecute Gingrich?)
Pelosi broke the law. That’s the beginning, and the end of it. She must be prosecuted, or else the Dem Cong will (justifiably) get the idea that laws don’t apply to them.
Of course, McCarthy’s advice to the President is to lay off:
That she also violated the Logan Act is an excellent rhetorical point. But it would make for an incredibly foolish indictment. Why turn the page from a worthy national-security debate over the right strategy for dealing with state sponsors of terrorism?
The president can not only win that debate. He can use this opportunity to illustrate how damaging the criminalization of politics is in a democracy. He can stress that policy is something the Framers committed to the good judgment of an informed citizenry, not to the courts. And he can trenchantly separate himself from his knee-jerk “let’s appoint a prosecutor” critics by pointedly explaining that he trusts the American people, not the judicial system, to decide such matters as whether they really want dtente Pelosi-style.
In other words: never mind the law, let’s score a debating point off the not-so-loyal Opposition?
Fach.
The lesson to be taught (not learned) is that foreign policy is the job of the Executive Branch, not Congress or the Judiciary. And I can think of no better person to be taught the lesson than the person who is currently second in line to the Presidency. This worthless amateur has played around in the quicksands of foreign policy like it’s just another playground—normal behavior, it should be noted, among Democrats—and has attempted to undermine the foreign policy of this country, just because she disagrees with it.
Well, this is nonsense. Charge her. Charge her now, and charge her to the fullest extent of the law. The Administration doesn’t need to appoint a “special prosecutor”, any more than they would need to appoint a special prosecutor to indict a kidnapper.
Pelosi has broken the law. That should be enough for anyone, but clearly it’s not enough for the weak and pusillanimous who are acting like they govern this country.
I don’t know for whom I feel more scorn: the lawbreaker or law enforcement.
A plague on both their houses.
