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Old 04-05-2007, 12:22 PM
Chris Alger Chris Alger is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Denver
Posts: 2,255
Default Re: Nancy Pelosi Going to Syria

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"The power to conduct and negotiate foreign policy lies with the executive branch and the executive branch only...."

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Something that distinguishes left from right in this country is the former's tendency to make up easily undermined facts. There is no basis, constitutional or otherwise, for the above statement. Of course the executive branch has no exclusive authority to "conduct and negotiate foreign policy." The constitution was designed to have all national policy chiefly made by the legislative branch, as it is in every republic. An exclusive right by the executive to conduct foreign policy would make the executive a foregin policy dictatorship, which of course the right prefers, but only when the president is a Republican.

Norman Orenstein, resident scholar at Bush's favorite think tank put it this way in last November's Foreign Affairs: "The making of sound U.S. foreign policy depends on a vigorous, deliberative, and often combative process that involves both the executive and the legislative branches. The country's Founding Fathers gave each branch both exclusive and overlapping powers in the realm of foreign policy, according to each one's comparative advantage -- inviting them, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin has put it, 'to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.'"

Aside from the totalitarian-leaning right, everyone, including purportedly President Bush, agrees with that statement. The protests over the Pelosi trip that simultaneously ignored the same kind of trips by GOP legislators quite transparently amounted to a partisan quibble over nothing, just grist for the right-wing propaganda machine.