SYRIA-NAH. Just to pile on for a moment on Syria-gate, regarding not the visit itself but the "communique" Nancy Pelosi passed on from Israel, Josh Marshall reminds us that the Israeli press actually covered the exchange as it happened, in such a way that raises some questions about the subsequent statements from Israeli PM Olmert's office appearing to contradict Pelosi. As Marshall says, this is at least a question worth some further exploration and, you know, reporting.
Meanwhile, Ken Baer cries foul on Pelosi. In doing so, he asks us to "leave aside" both the question of whether or not she screwed up and fabricated an Israeli message that didn't actually exist (Baer asks us to leave that question aside while in passing endorsing the notion that she did indeed screw up) and the question of whether or not the United States should, in fact, be engaging diplomatically with Syria. Instead, Baer takes issue with Pelosi on procedural grounds: the Speaker of the House should not be "conducting foreign policy." As he puts it, "There is a real separation of powers issue at stake here, a concern about the powers of the Presidency, as an institution, and how our country is represented abroad." He warns against "creating a new imbalance, by stepping on the president�s ability to conduct foreign affairs, [which] is something that can hurt the Presidency and the country for years to come ... [W]e must know our limits, and respect them."
I wonder where Baer gets the impression that a high-level congressional official injecting him or herself in a high-profile foreign policy issue represents a "new imbalance." There is, to put it simply, nothing new or unprecedented about Pelosi's actions here -- they have a seamless historical lineage, from Mike Mansfield in Vietnam to Tip O'Neill in Argentina to Jim Wright in Nicaragua to Newt Gingrich in China. That is to say, again, there's no "new imbalance." Now, to be sure, those past visits were also the subject of controversy and similar procedural objections by critics. So there is a question -- one I'd like to see taken up more by constitutional scholars and analysts -- about what is and isn't desirable in non-executive foreign policy ventures. I happen to think the substantive view on this endorsed by Baer is wrong -- an unnecessarily absolutist stance on behalf of presidential power -- but I'd love for him to actually defend it substantively rather than simply assume that it is both correct and the longstanding consensus position in American history. I'd also love to see Baer and others (like The Washington Post editorial board) actually take up other substantive questions at hand, like our Syria policy, rather than harp on the process point. Doing so would help disabuse those of us prone to possibly unfair inferences about motivation and disingenuousness from the suspicion that this procedural objection is being raised largely as a pretext for criticizing a politician whom Baer and the Post don't like whose foreign policy views they don't agree with.
UPDATE: And yeah, also what Matt says.
--Sam Rosenfeld
