A visitor to America might think Democrats won last fall’s election and that Republicans lost. Why? Because, when observers connect the dots, Republicans are on defense, ceding legislative powers to an aggressive executive branch in an unprecedented manner.
Despite electoral losses for his party, President Obama is on offense. He is now testing the radical proposition of having his secretary of state negotiate a nuclear weapons deal with the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terror without having the Senate ratify the treaty. How? By naming it an “agreement” rather than a “treaty,” and by seeking its authority through the United Nations rather than Congress.
As Andrew C. McCarthy wrote this month, “It is otherworldly to find an American administration conspiring against the Constitution and the Congress in cahoots with a terror-sponsoring enemy regime, with which we do not even have formal diplomatic relations, in order to pave the enemy’s way to nuclear weapons, of all things.”
Nile Gardiner, the Heritage Foundation’s Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center, calls this development “astonishing” and “imperialistic” in this video interview. “If the British Prime Minister decided to strike a deal with a rogue regime against the wishes of Parliament, that Prime Minister wouldn’t last very long,” Gardiner explains. “There’d be a rebellion and revolt. There’d be a vote of no confidence. That’s the difference in our systems of government.”
Dr. Gardiner praised Sen. Tom Cotton and the 46 Republicans who warned Iran that any deal would not last beyond Obama’s term in office. The Cotton letter has resulted in leftist protests and bizarre calls for his prosecution under the Logan Act as an “act of treason” for trying to restrain President Obama’s and Secretary of State John Kerry’s Iranian negotiations.
Does a country with porous borders still have its national sovereignty? The concept of national sovereignty, according to Gardiner, doesn’t mean much to the left who are in power right now. Rather, they seek governance from supra-nationalist organizations. “Once you allow the United Nations to start dictating U.S. policies, America is no longer a sovereign and free nation.”
Asked for what Margaret Thatcher might say of world affairs, Gardiner ventures to guess, “She’d be pretty appalled at the state of affairs today. She would be warning the free world that the West has to mobilize to face an array of threats — the rise of Islamic militancy in the Middle East and Europe, the specter of nuclear Iran on the horizon and the resurgence of an imperialist Russia. She would have been rallying the leaders of the West to stand up against evil that is rising up.”
Gardiner also discusses Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe, and the Islamic threat in Europe in this two-part video interview.
WATCH PART TWO:
For more on Gardiner, see his page at Heritage here and his book on Margaret Thatcher here.
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