So much for this being a mere snub or breach of protocol. If left-wing radio host Thom Hartmann had his way, House Speaker John Boehner would be in shackles and awaiting trial for inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress without first clearing the invitation with the Obama White House.
Citing the Constitution to justify his claim, Hartmann said on his show Thursday that Boehner may be guilty of treason or sedition for going around Obama, who reportedly detests Netanyahu (and vice versa) and would much rather converse with YouTube class clowns who bathe in milk and cereal.
Here's Hartmann making his case for putting Boehner in the dock (audio) --
Now I want to get to the topic that I wanted to start the first hour with today, which is -- is John Boehner a traitor? Is it possible that by inviting a foreign head of state to speak to a joint meeting of Congress to lobby for a piece of legislation that will affect that foreign nation and may affect the interests, both political and financial, of the Republican Party, that John Boehner has committed a crime that may even rise to the level of sedition or treason? Can you imagine if John Boehner had invited Vladimir Putin to speak before the United Nations ...
Revealing slip ...
Excuse me, speak before the assembled members of Congress about the Ukraine crisis? Or if he had invited the president of China to come and talk? Everybody would be hysterical. Can you imagine if when the Democrats controlled Congress, if when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House and Hugo Chavez was still alive, and I think they overlapped, if she had invited Hugo Chavez to come address the United ...
Oops! There he goes again ...
... the, uh, assembled delegates of the House and Senate, United States House of Representatives, United States Senate, to invite Hugo Chavez to come and speak on whether or not the United States should become a more socialist nation, right ...
"More" socialist -- as opposed to merely "socialist" -- seeing how we're well along on the road to serfdom --
.... whether or not we should nationalize our oil industry the way that Venezuela did.
How's that working out, by the way ...?
Can you imagine how, you know, not just how Republicans would react, everybody would react! It would be considered insane. Well, John Boehner has invited Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress without running it through the White House. Article Two, Section Two, sentence two of the U.S. Constitution makes it very clear that foreign policy is the province of the president, and that after the president negotiates treaties with foreign nations, they are approved by two-thirds' vote in the Senate. John Boehner is not even in the Senate, he's in the House of Representatives.
So there's a variety of possibilities under which you could, a) you could call this sedition, b) you could say that, although sedition is conduct or speech designed to incite people to rebel against the authority of a state. Arguably he's not asking people to rebel against the authority of the state, of our state, although, you know, the authority of the state is to conduct foreign policy. We're talking, you know, he wants Netanyahu to lobby against Iran, to lobby against the president's negotiations with Iran, to put more strict penalties and, I mean, John Boehner is like the American equivalent of the ayatollahs, you know, the hard-right fringe in Iran which doesn't want America negotiating with Iran, and then you've got the hard-right fringe in the United States that doesn't want America negotiating with Iran.
Let's not forget the hard-left fringe in America that wants to roll over and let a fanatical theocracy in the Middle East acquire nuclear weapons. After all, it's only fair. We've got 'em too, right?
Another option is, back in 1799, President John Adams was very upset about the fact that a number of members of Congress had traveled to France or were corresponding with the French and discussing things like American foreign policy, or for that matter, American domestic policy. He considered this a violation of the law. The Logan Act, which was passed in 1799, makes it a felony, three years in prison, to negotiate with foreign governments, and I would argue that this is a form of negotiation, or an attempt to influence negotiation, to negotiate with foreign governments, quote, without authority.
Now, the Logan Act doesn't define what 'without authority' means, but certainly when John Adams was president and this was passed, and it is still the law, the authority was assigned by the president, because the president is given authority over foreign policy in the Constitution.
Unless of course the president's last name is Bush and Democrats control Congress, whereupon a Speaker of the House can travel to Syria, as Pelosi did in 2007, in defiance of the Bush White House, and negotiate with Assad's Baathist regime while our troops were still fighting remnants of another Baathist regime in neighboring Iraq.
Isn't it odd that Pelosi avoided prison for such obvious treason?
(In case you're wondering, the screenshot was taken from Hartmann's annual mock State of the Union speech).
