Congress & Obama: Talk

Fiddling with the law
April 7, 2015
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April 7, 2015
Fiddling with the law
April 7, 2015
Jindal record under attack in governor’s race
April 7, 2015

Congress has developed a fondness for open letters when it comes to Iran. First came the warning shot signed by 47 Republican senators that touched off a storm of criticism. Not to be outdone, the House checked in with its own bipartisan and more diplomatically stated letter to the President, warning that its members must be satisfied with any agreement before they’ll vote to reduce sanctions.

What lies behind these moves? I think Congress feels left out of foreign policy-making.


I have considerable sympathy for this impulse. Over the decades, too much power has drifted to the President when it comes to foreign affairs. The Congress has been deferential, even timid, in allowing this to happen.

Moreover, the administration has not done an especially good job of consulting with Congress. The President is the chief actor in foreign policy, and it’s his obligation to reach out and develop a sustained dialogue with Congress on foreign policy matters. As far as I can tell, he has not done that sufficiently.

Yet much as I want to see Congress speak up on foreign policy, how it does so matters. The Senate’s letter to Iran was ill-considered and unhelpful. Its purpose was to defeat the nuclear negotiations, and it undercut the President while he was trying to negotiate a deal with another world leader. It raised questions about America’s reliability, invited doubt about the President’s ability to negotiate a deal, and created a major distraction at a crucial moment. The letter undermined not only this President’s credibility, but undermines future presidents’ as well. It suggests that no one in the U.S. government is empowered to strike a deal.


The letter did focus appropriately on presidential use of executive orders to conduct foreign policy, but it wrongly implied that presidents are hamstrung in the conduct of policy. The senators suggested that an executive order on Iran is likely to be reversed by a future president, which is not true. Presidential deals with other countries are rarely overturned by their successors.

In part, this is because once an agreement is in place it becomes very difficult to undo — especially if it’s working. Also, presidents are reluctant to reverse their predecessors’ work because they don’t want to undercut the same tool they themselves rely on to pursue their foreign policy goals.

As a nation we’ve gotten into the bad habit of using executive orders for the most important foreign policy initiatives – including such watershed moments as Richard Nixon’s opening toward China and President Obama’s accord with Syria banning the use of chemical weapons.


Yet the fact that a president can act on his own does not mean that he should do so. The reliance on executive orders means we have no clear mechanism, or even requirement, for the President to consult and work with Congress on foreign policy. So Congress feels left out of the action, and in an effort to deal itself back in it behaves clumsily, as the Senate did with the Iran letter.

Congress’s bid to reopen the question is not a bad thing. But if the President and the Congress want to avoid these flare-ups, they should exercise in-depth, sustained consultation.