American Document/Right Anger
Courter, Jim
RIGHT ANGER by Jim Courter W hat we learn from the Iran-Contra hearings is more important than the hearings themselves. The facts are important—but the lessons are essential. One thing we should...
...Yet Congress had to force Ronald Reagan to publish Soviet treaty violations...
...Congress has been pushing for a wider role in foreign policy, with the War Powers Act, the Clark Amendment, and similar restrictions...
...On the one hand is an Administration's need to protect classified information, sensitive programs, and covert operations...
...When the harmonious relationship between Congress and President breaks down, everything suffers...
...Yet it was Congress, without Reagan's support, that repealed the Clark Amendment...
...Second, we should learn that when the Constitution is working, the chief executive has primacy in foreign policy, but Congress also has a role...
...Programs are scrubbed, sensitive operations are damaged, foreign governments distance themselves, and Americans lose...
...In fact, the Reagan Administration's whole foreign policy approach is marked by a kind of camouflage, by a refusal to take America into its confidence, to say what must be done and then to do it...
...It was the President who traded a spy for an innocent journalist kidnapped by Gorbachev—and then said he didn't make a deal...
...One thing we should learn here is that, there is always tension between two legitimate constitutional needs...
...Yet Ronald Reagan's Administration is being chopped down by its secret eagerness to trade with terrorists while publicly denying it would ever do that...
...But it is his Administration's policy to postpone deployment and engage in a lawyer's dispute about the words of a treaty that should never have been signed...
...Congress has a right to know how the chief executive is conducting the nation's business...
...And it was Ronald Reagan who ran to Reykjavik at Gorbachev's command...
...Ronald Reagan should have had the courage of Ronald Reagan's convictions...
...When the President uses "cooperation" as an excuse to give up on its foreign policy, the executive branch loses its ability to conduct foreign policy...
...When the President has abdicated, the solution is simple: let Congress be President...
...On the other hand is the need for congressional knowledge and oversight...
...The captain of this Administration has been turning it so slowly he hopes no one will notice...
...Ronald Reagan chopped down trees in 1980 and hinted at what he would do to Iran if the hostages weren't returned...
...When Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, a major reason was his understanding of what was wrong and his clear vision for the future...
...It seemed easier for Reagan's White House to find "holes" in the Boland Amendment than to challenge the wisdom of that measure, its isolationism, its constitutionality...
...In politics, too, nature abhors a vacuum...
...It may seem odd, but the Constitution only works when each branch stands up for its proper powers and rights...
...And finally, what about this President—any President...
...That need must be met with confidence and nondisclosure, where appropriate...
...Ronald Reagansaid the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" that couldn't be trusted to keep its agreements...
...What are its fruits...
...Congress rushed in to fill it—with the Boland Amendment, with restraints on new weapons procurements, lately with the threat of forcing America to live within the SALT II treaty limits...
...You can't just sneak policy up on the American people...
...Who but Ronald Reagan is to blame for jeopardizing that which he himself wanted to do...
...Yet instead of taking the case for the Nicaraguan freedom fighters to the people, Ronald Reagan's Administration went covert...
...This Administration's lack of frankness sometimes appalls me...
...This is where President Reagan has brought us in our Constitution's bicentennial year...
...Ronald Reagan said he wanted to support the freedom fighters in Angola...
...The Administration doesn't give, and Congress doesn't get, information...
...When the Founding Fathers gave Congress power over revenues, they dealt Congress in...
...This article is adapted from his opening statement at the Joint Hearings of the Senate and House Committees Investigating Arms Sales to Iran...
...It was his Administration that stood by when Major Nicholson bled to death on the concrete in Berlin, when petty officer Stethem was murdered by terrorists in Beirut, when a passenger plane was shot from the skies over the Sea of Japan...
...What can we learn from this trend...
...Candidate Ronald Reagan said he wanted to turn the ship of state around...
...T t didn't take Congress long to discover this White House was empty...
...1=1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 29...
...But this relationship has been changing...
...It is Ronald Reagan who says he is for deploying the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...Courter is a congressman from New Jersey...
...Ronald Reagan once said he wanted the Communist Sandinistas to "cry uncle," yet it was his Administration's policy to use the freedom fighters only to interdict arms shipments to El Salvador, to pretend we weren't mining Nicaraguan waters against Soviet and Cuban ships, and to rely on the "Contadora process" to push the Soviets out of the Western hemisphere...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
