At The Water's Edge

Yesterday I looked up the Logan Act in Legal-Dictionary. The act was passed during the Adams Administration in 1799. In short, the act prohibits any citizen from negotiating with another nation on behalf of the United States without the authorization of the United States. As Legal Dictionary points out, however, the language is so broad that it “... appears to encompass almost every communication" between a U.S. Citizen and a foreign government that could be considered an “attempt to influence negotiations” between the two countries. Perhaps it is because of the first amendment concerns caused by the broad language, but no one has actually been charged with violating the act (although the act has been used as a threat on a few occasions). Furthermore, two former Presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, could have been charged under the Logan Act before either of them became President. In fact in his book, Chasing Shadows, Ken Hughes asserts that Richard Nixon's involvement in trying to cover up the Watergate burglary was motivated by his fear that an investigation of the crime would turn up evidence that Mr. Nixon had violated the Logan Act by interfering with Lyndon Johnson's negotiations to end the Vietnam War!  

If Mr. Hughes is correct, and he does present a compelling argument, the fear that the act would be enforced has had quite an impact on our history. Mr. Nixon, the cold warier, frequently talked about the moral and patriotic imperative of a bipartisan effort to contain the Soviet Union and the spread of communism; add to this Mr. Nixon's fear of the condemnation he would face because of the thousands of lives lost as a result of prolonging the Vietnam war and you can easily see why he might fear prosecution under the Logan Act. Indeed it is the loss of those lives that makes something like the Logan Act desirable. The question, of course, is how much opposition to an administration's foreign policy is healthy and what actions in opposition to those policies do we deem to be too harmful to our nation's interests.

During the cold war foreign policy was hotly debated but the consensus in regard to the policy containment and the patriotism of both parties placed limits on how far either party would go. The point being that both parties recognized the necessity of presenting a united front to the countries that threatened us. Thus we embraced the concept that partisanship ended at the shoreline. The hyper-partisanship of the Republican Party now seems to defy that wise concept of national unity. The Republicans scream that President Obama is to blame for every thing going wrong in the entire world, but when penned down they offer no viable alternatives for dealing with any of the situations they complain about. I think what President Obama is going to say about how he intends to deal ISIS is fairly predictable to anyone who has been paying attention. How the Republicans will react to the course of action he intends pursue is also predictable, I would say sadly predictable. I will be pleasantly surprised if I am wrong. It would be nice to know that the Republicans are capable of placing some bounds on the partisanship.