It is fortuitous that the extraordinary story of how, in its early days, the Obama administration approved a deal that allowed Russia to buy huge amounts of U.S.-owned uranium is slowly unfolding even as we anticipate the next act in the battle between President Obama and the Senate over who gets to say what about that nuclear deal between the United states and Iran.
Both issues sharply point to the critical need for a thorough review of decision-making authority in our federal government. The problem is certainly not unique to the Obama presidency, but this president’s wont for pushing the envelope of his authority at the expense of Congressional prerogatives has helped bring it to the top of the public agenda.
To make things even more intriguing concerning the first issue, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her necessary consent, even as, in the words of a New York Times headline, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal” –alluding to reports that major Canadian contributors to the Clinton Foundation, with an enormous financial interest in the outcome, brokered the deal.
Until the story broke, few knew that such a deal could ever be contemplated by U.S. officials, given the central connection between uranium and nuclear power and the implications for American national security. Yet there is the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment that is tasked with the monitoring of deals such as this and it is comprised of the secretary of state, the attorney general, the secretary of the treasury, the secretary of defense, the secretary of homeland security, the secretary of commerce, and the secretary of energy.
Whatever they knew and when they knew it, and their use of that information, will undoubtedly become clearer in the weeks and months ahead. But what seems plain even at this early juncture is that these senior Cabinet members didn’t share with the country any news of any sort they may have had. Perhaps they never made the connection, but the bottom line is that not only was the public not made aware of the deal itself, but we also never learned about an apparent flow of a vast amount of money from foreign entrepreneurs to Ms. Clinton’s family foundation and her acting in her official capacity to further their interests in the uranium deal.
Our point is that it is foolhardy to rely on one branch of government to monitor itself. In fact, such healthy skepticism lies behind the “separation of powers” theory of government embedded in our Constitution which prescribes “checks and balances” between and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government.
Which brings us to the imbroglio between President Obama and the Senate over the attempts to negotiate a deal with Iran that will supposedly limit Iran’s drive toward nuclear-weapons capacity. Stripped of all the political hyperbole and gamesmanship, the central issue underlying the controversy is the classic political question of “Who decides?”
The president is unwilling to cede any of what he considers his exclusive powers in the area of foreign policy and has struggled mightily to keep the Senate away from any role in the kind of deal to be negotiated. Many senators, though, insist the Constitution grants the Senate “advise and consent” prerogatives usually understood as the power to approve or disapprove treaties with foreign governments and presidential appointments to public positions.
The current controversy revolves around Mr. Obama’s refusal to accept that the deal he proposes to make with Iran is a treaty – a conceit that allows him to insist that it therefore doesn’t require Senate approval. In fact, the Constitution is silent concerning a definition of a treaty. However, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties defines a treaty as “an international agreement concluded between States in written form and governed by international law, whether embodied in a single instrument or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation.”
So the Senate seems to have a compelling argument, but then again, with this president, that doesn’t amount to much. He just rejects such a contention and, as he has done with regard to other major issues, effectively says, in so many words, “sue me.”
When the Senate sought legislation to compel Mr. Obama to recognize Senate authority with respect to the Iran deal, the president threatened a veto. This led to several rounds of furious back and forth between the White House and the Senate, resulting in a compromise legislative proposal that the president said he would sign. In recent days, however, the compromise seems to be unraveling as Senate Republicans express increasing unease about their inability to actually thwart a deal with Iran should they determine it is against U.S. security interests.
The Iran issue seems to have all the makings of an epic battle between a president who thinks he is the fount of all wisdom and who cannot be bothered with confounding niceties of precedent and rules, and a Congress that is appalled by the prospect of an out of control president presiding over a historic failure to protect American vital interests.
It is to be hoped that public revulsion over the embarrassing piecemeal collapse of the American negotiating position will, in the end, permit a rebalancing of how our national government is run and correct this president’s dangerous lurch toward an autocratic executive branch.