Chad Pegram, who covers Capitol Hill for Fox News, tweeted yesterday afternoon,
Cruz vows to block all Obama Admin State Dept nominees over UN #IranDeal action
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) July 16, 2015
White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz immediately pointed out that this is not the first time Cruz has stomped his little feet and held his breath to get what he wants:
Oops. Done this before, huh Ted? Maybe you should threaten to light yourself on fire next time.
Schultz tweeted newspaper editorial after newspaper editorial yesterday, all showing support of the president’s Iran deal, including a Haaretz op-ed asking that the nuclear agreement be given a chance. He pointed also to an article by Dafna Linzer on MSNBC: On Iran, no need to speculate about the alternative. We’ve already lived it.
Though Jeb Bush condemns the Iran deal, calling it “appeasement,” it was his own brother, as Alan Rappeport points out in The New York Times, who brought the United States to the negotiating table nine years ago. Since Jeb says Dubya is his key advisor, there must be a memory lapse going on there somewhere. Given the intellects involved, that’s hardly a leap, however convenient for Jeb.
You would think this would all be self-evident. It’s all part of the record. Furthermore, you would think it would be obvious to even ideological hidebound Republicans in Congress that editorials aside, polling shows the American people do not want to go to war over Iran. We don’t even want to go back into Iraq to clean up the mess Bush left there, a mess called the Islamic State.
To listen to Republicans, war is the only option:
#IranNuclearDeal = increased national security via @ChrisMurphyCT. #IranDeal @SenateDems @HouseDemocrats pic.twitter.com/50KUZ5rAVa
— MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) July 17, 2015
Given widespread support for diplomacy, something that will neither kill a lot of Americans or destroy our economy – AGAIN – it is difficult to see what Republicans think they can get out of opposition to the nuclear deal, but that is presuming that Republicans are thinking at all. After all, what could be more amusing than listenig to the right wing media claim Obama’s actions will lead to war, when war is what the Republicans are demanding? Can the GOP get more absurd?
We have to remember that it is not only the nuclear deal they are opposing and Israel they are supporting: If Obama is for it, they are against it. In fact, given the history of the past six-and-a-half years, it is difficult to imagine they would support the Iran deal even if Israel did.
The Republican Party, when the results of Election night 2008 came in, swore to do all in their power to nullify our first black president, to oppose him at every turn, and they have done that. They have shut down the government, they have refused to create a single job or to participate in any meaningful way in the business of government. If anything, identical election results in 2012 just made their reaction worse.
This is the party, after all, which, having lost the presidential election, acted like the president now had to do exactly what the House of Representatives said, as though the Executive Branch – the abode of the “decider” when a Republican occupies it – was suddenly an adjunct to the Legislative Branch. How much less significant a president when both houses of Congress are Republican?
And no, they haven’t read the United States Constitution, or they would see that is not how this works. It is not how any of this works. The Republicans have all history back to the ratification of the Constitution in 1789 to look for examples of how the government works – three independent branches, executive, legislative, and judicial – balancing each other out to prevent tyranny. But they are too busy listening to David Barton and Fox News invent facts to actually figure out what their job is.
And it is not to nullify the presidency as a branch of government. While Cruz claims the president is trying to circumvent Congress, Obama has the authority, and what is actually happening is that Cruz is trying to circumvent the executive branch.
Ted Cruz’s stunts are all part of their sworn opposition to all things Obama, just another excuse to refuse to do his job as an elected official and to put himself in the spotlight. The grandstanding Ted Cruz is a disgrace to the United States Senate, and to the United States of America.
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