OPINION:
Sometimes public opinion must submit to a history lesson. The famous letter to Iran, signed by 47 senators, urging the mullahs in Tehran to beware of making a deal with President Obama to restrain their pursuit of the Islamic bomb, has got some Democrats in a proper tizzy over the Logan Act. These Democrats don’t appear to know any more about the Logan Act than the rest of the anvil chorus, but they want the senators prosecuted for treason. They have collected 165,000 names on a petition to Mr. Obama urging him to prosecute someone.
The Logan Act, prohibiting private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in the name of the United States, was enacted by Congress in 1799 after a Pennsylvania physician and Republican zealot named George Logan sailed off to Paris to negotiate a peaceful settlement of differences with France, lest misunderstandings lead to war. He was never prosecuted for being a busybody, and the next year, in fact, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Only one person, a Kentucky farmer who in 1803 wanted several western states (as the West was then defined) to secede and make an alliance with France, has ever been cited for violating the Logan Act. The law has not been tested since, though other busybodies have provoked presidents and partisans. Henry Ford took a chartered ship of peaceniks to Europe in 1915 to settle World War I, and Jane Fonda provoked everyone when she went to Hanoi to charm Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. Neither was prosecuted.
The letter to Tehran was written by Tom Cotton, a freshman Republican senator from Arkansas, who wants to prevent Mr. Obama signing an agreement with the mullahs unless he agrees to submit it for approval by Congress, and lays out his reasons why. The angry Democratic senators and scholars (of dubious scholarship) cry treason, one of the most heinous of crimes. Mr. Cotton’s letter was actually little more than a letter to the editor, perhaps rising to the level of an op-ed, but something far short of a “negotiation.”
The letter may or may not have been a good idea; members of Congress have always been free with their opinions, some good and some bad. But to call it treason reveals only a hysterical reaction to congressmen being congressmen. And congresswomen. Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, traveled to Syria to negotiate with President Bashar Assad of Syria over the objections of President George W. Bush, and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1983 importuned Yuri Andropov, the leader of the Soviet Union, to help him prevent President Ronald Reagan from negotiating a missile treaty with Moscow.
A memorandum in the Soviet files, uncovered after the fall of the Soviet Union, described how the head of the KGB, Kennedy and John Tunney, a Democratic senator from California, tried to enlist Andropov in their effort to halt the deployment of missiles to Europe and weaken Mr. Reagan in anticipation of the presidential election of 1984.
According to the KGB memorandum, “Kennedy asks Y.V. Andropov to consider inviting the senator to Moscow for a personal meeting in July of this year. The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.”
This was truly outrageous, something well beyond a letter to the editor, but Democrats held their tongues. No one knows what a violation of the Logan Act would actually be, since the U.S. Supreme Court has never looked at it, but if anyone has violated the spirit of the law it was Ted Kennedy, not Tom Cotton. The Democratic hysterics should take an aspirin, lie down and they’ll feel better in the morning.
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