The U.S. Senate voted 98-to-Tom Cotton last week to approve a perfectly practical negotiated agreement.
The measure provided Congress with a window to express formally its disapproval of the still-incomplete deal to impair Iran’s nuclear weaponry development.
The bill allows Congress to vote to block President Barack Obama’s easing of sanctions against Iran, which he says is otherwise within the authority of his Treasury Department. Blocking the easing of sanctions would be vetoed, most likely, and Congress surely would surely lack the two-thirds majorities to override.
So the bill last week constructed an anemic congressional role. But it was all that could be passed on a bipartisan basis to secure Obama’s signature and give Congress any muscle on the issue at all.
That wasn’t good enough for the purist Cotton, who went politically thermonuclear, or perhaps was already, and always, there.
Earlier he had sought to blow up the multinational talks with Iran by spearheading a public letter from 47 Republican senators to Iranian officials seeking to undercut this American president as a cipher. Then he sought to sabotage the aforementioned negotiated bill in the Senate by offering amendments that were belligerent toward Iran—unfettered inspections, Iran’s forced recognition of Israel—and would have killed the bill.
The Republican leadership squashed Cotton’s amendments, because even puny leverage is better than no leverage, and because politics is the art of compromise.
When your senator is the “one” in a 98-to-1 vote, particularly on something as important as nuclear containment, then you should rise to meet your constituent responsibility.
That responsibility is to consider whether your conspicuous “one” is:
• Admirably principled.
• An ineffective and extremist zealot.
• Wrong in his admirable principle.
Or you could come to the conclusion I reached long ago: all of the above.
Cotton is much like, and yet not at all like, Vic Snyder. In full context, Cotton actually is the perfect inverse of Snyder, the liberal former congressman for the 2nd District of Central Arkansas.
Both men are military veterans—Snyder as a Marine in Vietnam and Cotton as an Army captain in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Snyder ran on an array of credentials—that, in addition to being a Marine veteran, he was a physician and lawyer with a progressive record as a state senator who made the ethical commitment not to take campaign contributions until weeks before an election.
Cotton, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former McKinsey business consultant, ran almost exclusively on being a warrior to be admired. For good measure, it was enough that he opposed Obama. When it came to money, he took bundles of it from the right-wing Club for Growth and hung out with the Koch brothers at a posh resort in California.
But to the point about similarity: In 1997 Snyder cast one of two dissenting votes in the House. It came on a resolution to proclaim Saddam Hussein a war criminal.
Snyder explained at the time that he did so because—get this—he viewed a congressional statement of that sort an inappropriate usurpation of the president’s role to decide whether to take such positions in international relations.
So there surely is great commonality between Snyder and Cotton in terms of possessing principle and acting iconoclastically. Clearly, neither is afraid to stand alone or nearly so in the foreign-policy arena. And yet there is great difference—diametric difference—in the nature and application of that principle and iconoclasm.
Snyder didn’t embrace hawkish policy. Cotton has consistently advocated hawkish policy and asserted special credibility for that policy from his military service.
Snyder didn’t presume for himself any special status on military and foreign-relations issues because of that service. Cotton has.
Snyder didn’t believe members of Congress should interject themselves in foreign policy, except, that is, when Congress was specifically asked by the president to do so, as in 2003 on the Iraq War resolution. Snyder, typically alone in the Arkansas delegation, opposed that resolution.
Cotton seems for all the world to be angling for a fight with somebody.
It all reminds me of the time in late 2010 when I met Cotton’s parents, Len and Avis.
We were in a thick crowd in that big meeting room in the Clinton Presidential Center. We were attending a farewell reception honoring Snyder on his departure from Congress.
Len and Avis, longtime supporters of Snyder, had come down from Dardanelle for the occasion.
Most likely Len and Avis would emphasize the similarities of principle in Snyder and their son. But I believe it is more important for the rest of us to focus on the vaster and more profound differences in what those principles are and how they are applied.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.