This week, 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to leaders of Iran warning the Islamic Republic about agreeing to a nuclear agreement with the Obama administration. The letter, written by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton and signed by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, tells Iran's leaders, "who may not fully understand our constitutional system," that any agreement would have to be ratified by Congress or would risk being reversed by the next president. "President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then -- perhaps decades," the letter reads, in part. The White House and Vice President Biden -- a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair -- strongly condemned the letter in a press release. "In 36 years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country -- much less a longtime foreign adversary -- that the President does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them," Biden said. "This letter sends a highly misleading signal to friend and foe alike that that our Commander-in-Chief cannot deliver on America’s commitments -- a message that is as false as it is dangerous." The two party's positions about foreign policy are a sharp reversal from just eight years ago when Republicans controlled the White House and Democrats controlled Congress. Shortly after becoming Speaker of the House in 2007, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) traveled to Syria to meet with President Bashar al-Assad against the wishes of President George W. Bush. His administration was trying to isolate the Syrian regime for allegedly aiding Iraqi insurgents in the ongoing Iraq War. The Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus, appearing on Washington Week, called Pelosi's visit a "deliberate in-your-face gesture" that made the Bush administration "furious."
Web Video: Opposition Party Circumvents President's Foreign Policy
Mar. 11, 2015 AT 6:50 p.m. EDT
TRANSCRIPT
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
MS. JEANNE CUMMINGS: What do you think about the speaker's excursion to Syria?
MR. DOYLE MCMANUS: Nancy Pelosi's Middle Eastern adventure?
MS. CUMMINGS: Yes, yes.
MS. IFILL: Yes, it seems like the Democrats were very in your face this week.
MR. MCMANUS: Actually, it was a deliberate in-your-face gesture, Nancy Pelosi -- look, it's unusual for a speaker to do this. Members of Congress go overseas all the time and you don't pay them a lot of attention.
MS. IFILL: Chris Dodd, John Kerry.
MR. MCMANUS: And we don't pay a whole lot of attention unless they're going to the south of France or sitting on a beach and we worry about how much they're spending. But this was the speaker of the House and she was doing diplomacy. She said she was taking messages from Israel to Syria, and she went to Syria that the administration has tried to freeze out. And what she was basically saying was "the Democrats have a different foreign policy, and that's to do more diplomacy and to talk to people like Syria and Iran, and not to confront them." The administration was furious --
MS. IFILL: They seemed furious in a kind of happy way -- (unintelligible) -- to beat up on her; she gave them an opportunity.
MR. MCMANUS: Vice President Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that this was bad behavior.
MS. IFILL: Bad behavior. It would have been interesting to see if he'd said that if it'd been a male speaker of the House. Behaving.
MR. MCMANUS: And so, everybody had a good time. Look, one problem, of course, that the administration had was almost as many Republicans were visiting Damascus this spring break as Democrats.
MS. IFILL: Well, that didn't (come up ?) so much.
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