Petition to file treason charges against the 47 gop senators who signed letter to iran

gimmesometruth27

public service announcement....

anybody wanting to sign the petition can read it here, and sign it at the below link:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
File charges against the 47 U.S. Senators in violation of The Logan Act in attempting to undermine a nuclear agreement.
On March 9th, 2015, forty-seven United States Senators committed a treasonous offense when they decided to violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. Violation of the Logan Act is a felony, punishable under federal law with imprisonment of up to three years.

At a time when the United States government is attempting to reach a potential nuclear agreement with the Iranian government, 47 Senators saw fit to instead issue a condescending letter to the Iranian government stating that any agreement brokered by our President would not be upheld once the president leaves office.

This is a clear violation of federal law. In attempting to undermine our own nation, these 47 senators have committed treason.

Published Date: Mar 09, 2015

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/file-charges-against-47-us-senators-violation-logan-act-attempting-undermine-nuclear-agreement/NKQnpJS9

Last-12-Exit

I guess nobody knows what treason is.

brianlux

"47 trolls" I think is how one article put it.

CH156378

I want to sign a petition that says, if we ever go to war with Iran, these 47 cocksuckers be on the front line.

Jason P

Treason???

A short letter explaining Constitutional powers and term lengths is treason?

Although if this is considered treason and their heads are put on spikes, it would be a fresh start on term limits. No one in congress could make it a full term if this sets the bar.

backseatLover12

trea·son
: the crime of trying to overthrow your country's government or of helping your country's enemies during war

Full Definition of TREASON

1
: the betrayal of a trust : treachery
2
: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family

Merriam-Webster

backseatLover12

Yeah, I do think that those Republicans are guilty.

rr165892

I love a good gentle compassionate liberal position.Always heartwarming and full of love.

rgambs

I don't think it is treason, or illegal, but I do think some sort of official rebuke should be given. It was incredibly stupid, factually innacurate, condescending, and immature...and Tom Cotton is proud of it. Yikes.

callen

rgambs said:

I don't think it is treason, or illegal, but I do think some sort of official rebuke should be given. It was incredibly stupid, factually innacurate, condescending, and immature...and Tom Cotton is proud of it. Yikes.

Gets him votes from all Obama haters.

gimmesometruth27

rr165892 said:

I love a good gentle compassionate liberal position.Always heartwarming and full of love.

kind of like the republicans who voted to deny health care coverage to the 9/11 first responders, right?

kinda like the 50+ attempts to take health insurance away from the now 12 million who have gotten it under the ACA, right?

gimmesometruth27

rgambs said:

I don't think it is treason, or illegal, but I do think some sort of official rebuke should be given. It was incredibly stupid, factually innacurate, condescending, and immature...and Tom Cotton is proud of it. Yikes.

when has it become legal for a political party in one branch of the government to contact the leaders of a country that has long been considered an adversary and tell them that any deal made currently will be broken in 2016?

does the senate make policy now?

plus, 47 is not even a majority of the senate.

gimmesometruth27

rgambs said:

I don't think it is treason, or illegal, but I do think some sort of official rebuke should be given. It was incredibly stupid, factually innacurate, condescending, and immature...and Tom Cotton is proud of it. Yikes.

sorry, forgot to mention that an official rebuke, at the very least, is what needs to happen.

obama is too much a pussy to even do that to the people who are attempting to undermine his administration.

meanwhile, mainstream media is focusing on the clinton email server. something that can actually harm a great deal of americans... :rolleyes:

rr165892

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

gimmesometruth27

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

i have gotten more militant, that is for sure.


probably because i am tired of dealing with stupidity in congress..

backseatLover12

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

And where has tolerance gotten the democratic party? Nowhere. They need to get angry so this ridiculous thing we call a government can actually possibly get changed for the better.

gimmesometruth27

backseatLover12 said:

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

And where has tolerance gotten the democratic party? Nowhere. They need to get angry so this ridiculous thing we call a government can actually possibly get changed for the better.

the reason obama can't last out is because he does not want to be seen as the "angry black man". it would just give the republicans more ammo to use against him.

anybody think LBJ would have put up with this bullshit?

rr165892

gimmesometruth27 said:

backseatLover12 said:

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

And where has tolerance gotten the democratic party? Nowhere. They need to get angry so this ridiculous thing we call a government can actually possibly get changed for the better.

the reason obama can't last out is because he does not want to be seen as the "angry black man". it would just give the republicans more ammo to use against him.

anybody think LBJ would have put up with this bullshit?

Of course not.LBJ would have worked with the War Hawks and had his opposition eliminated.Cmon you knew that.

rr165892

backseatLover12 said:

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

And where has tolerance gotten the democratic party? Nowhere. They need to get angry so this ridiculous thing we call a government can actually possibly get changed for the better.

Let me know how that works out.

rr165892

BSL,thinking this stalemate in Govt is one sided is a bit short sighted.

gimmesometruth27

rr165892 said:

gimmesometruth27 said:

backseatLover12 said:

rr165892 said:

Rod,The other side gets ridiculous also.Its not just you guys.But the left seems more angry and militant and they are supposed to be the ones who are more tolerant.Just an observation.

And where has tolerance gotten the democratic party? Nowhere. They need to get angry so this ridiculous thing we call a government can actually possibly get changed for the better.

the reason obama can't last out is because he does not want to be seen as the "angry black man". it would just give the republicans more ammo to use against him.

anybody think LBJ would have put up with this bullshit?

Of course not.LBJ would have worked with the War Hawks and had his opposition eliminated.Cmon you knew that.

lbj would have publicly shamed people like ted cruz, and this newb cotton.

gimmesometruth27

nixon would have too.

gimmesometruth27

i just came up with a theory.

maybe this letter was written out of fear?

the gop ALWAYS has to have an enemy. a country that they can say is a threat to our freedom and the american way of life.

if this agreement happens, it means that iran would not be considered that threat anymore. the 47 would have no country to be scared of anymore. they would have no country to push around and beat their chests at anymore. that would make them lose the appearance of being "strong".

why do they always have to play it like we are on the brink of war with a country in the middle east?

backseatLover12

The real story behind the Republicans’ Iran letter

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/real-story-behind-republicans-iran-letter-1104421078
http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/17/real-story-behind-republicans-iran-letter/

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Cotton and his colleagues were inviting inevitable comparison with the 1968 conspiracy by Richard Nixon, through rightwing campaign official Anna Chenault, to encourage the Vietnamese government of President Nguyen Van Thieu to boycott peace talks in Paris.

But while Nixon was plotting secretly to get Thieu to hold out for better terms under a Nixon administration, the 47 Republican Senators were making their effort to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks in full public scrutiny. And the interest served by the letter was not that of a possible future president but of the Israeli government.

The Cotton letter makes arguments that are patently false. The letter suggested that any agreement that lacked approval of Congress “is a mere executive agreement”, as though such agreements are somehow of only marginal importance in US diplomatic history. In fact, the agreements on withdrawal of US forces from both the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq were not treaties but executive agreements.

Equally fatuous is the letter’s assertion that “future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.” Congress can nullify the agreement by passing legislation that contradicts it but can’t renegotiate it. And the claim that the next president could “revoke the agreement with the stroke of a pen,” ignores the fact that the Iran nuclear agreement, if signed, will become binding international law through a United Nations Security Council resolution, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has pointed out.

The letter has provoked the charge of “treason” against the signers and a demand for charges against them for negotiating with a foreign government in violation of the Logan Act. In a little over 24 hours, more than 200,000 people had signed a petition on the White House website calling such charges to be filed.

But although that route may seem satisfying at first thought, it is problematic for both legal and political reasons. The Logan Act was passed in 1799, and has never been used successfully to convict anyone, mainly because it was written more than a century before US courts created legal standards for the protection of first amendment speech rights. And it is unclear whether the Logan Act was even meant to apply to members of Congress anyway.

AIPAC Marching Orders

The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government. The premise of the Senate Republican reflected in the letter – that Iran must not be allowed to have any enrichment capacity whatever – did not appear spontaneously. The views that Cotton and the other Republicans have espoused on Iran were the product of assiduous lobbying by Israeli agents of influence using the inducement of promises of election funding and the threat of support for the members’ opponents in future elections.

Those members of Congress don’t arrive at their positions on issues related to Iran through discussion and debate among themselves. They are given their marching orders by AIPAC lobbyists, and time after time, they sign the letters and vote for legislation or resolution that they are given, as former AIPAC lobbyist MJ Rosenberg has recalled. This Israeli exercise of control over Congress on Iran and issues of concern to Israel resembles the Soviet direction of its satellite regimes and loyal Communist parties more than any democratic process, but with campaign contributions replacing the inducements that kept its bloc allies in line.

Cotton’s Loyalty to Israel

Rosenberg has reasoned that AIPAC must have drafted the letter and handed it to Senator Cotton. “Nothing happens on Capitol Hill related to Israel,” he tweets, “unless and until Howard Kohr (AIPAC chief) wants it to happen. Nothing.” AIPAC apparently supported the letter, but there may be more to the story. Senator Cotton just happens to be a protégé of neoconservative political kingpin Bill Kristol, whose Emergency Committee on Israel gave him nearly a million dollars late in his 2014 Senate campaign and guaranteed that Cotton would have the support of the four biggest funders of major anti-Iran organizations.

Cotton proved his absolute fealty to Likudist policy on Iran by sponsoring an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013 that would have punished violators of the sanctions against Iran with prison sentences of up to 20 years and extended the punishment to “a spouse and any relative, to the third degree” of the sanctions violator. In presenting the amendment in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Cotton provided the useful clarification that it would have included “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids”.

That amendment, which he apparently believed would best reflect his adoption of the Israeli view of how to cut Iran down to size, was unsuccessful, but it established his reliability in the eyes of the Republican Likudist kingmakers. Now Kristol is grooming him to be the vice-presidential nominee in 2016.

So the real story behind the letter from Cotton and his Republican colleagues is how the enforcers of Likudist policy on Iran used an ambitious young Republican politician to try to provoke a breakdown in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The issue it raises is a far more serious issue than the Logan Act, but thus far major news organizations have steered clear of that story.

badbrains

backseatLover12 said:

The real story behind the Republicans’ Iran letter

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/real-story-behind-republicans-iran-letter-1104421078
http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/17/real-story-behind-republicans-iran-letter/

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Cotton and his colleagues were inviting inevitable comparison with the 1968 conspiracy by Richard Nixon, through rightwing campaign official Anna Chenault, to encourage the Vietnamese government of President Nguyen Van Thieu to boycott peace talks in Paris.

But while Nixon was plotting secretly to get Thieu to hold out for better terms under a Nixon administration, the 47 Republican Senators were making their effort to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks in full public scrutiny. And the interest served by the letter was not that of a possible future president but of the Israeli government.

The Cotton letter makes arguments that are patently false. The letter suggested that any agreement that lacked approval of Congress “is a mere executive agreement”, as though such agreements are somehow of only marginal importance in US diplomatic history. In fact, the agreements on withdrawal of US forces from both the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq were not treaties but executive agreements.

Equally fatuous is the letter’s assertion that “future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.” Congress can nullify the agreement by passing legislation that contradicts it but can’t renegotiate it. And the claim that the next president could “revoke the agreement with the stroke of a pen,” ignores the fact that the Iran nuclear agreement, if signed, will become binding international law through a United Nations Security Council resolution, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has pointed out.

The letter has provoked the charge of “treason” against the signers and a demand for charges against them for negotiating with a foreign government in violation of the Logan Act. In a little over 24 hours, more than 200,000 people had signed a petition on the White House website calling such charges to be filed.

But although that route may seem satisfying at first thought, it is problematic for both legal and political reasons. The Logan Act was passed in 1799, and has never been used successfully to convict anyone, mainly because it was written more than a century before US courts created legal standards for the protection of first amendment speech rights. And it is unclear whether the Logan Act was even meant to apply to members of Congress anyway.

AIPAC Marching Orders

The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government. The premise of the Senate Republican reflected in the letter – that Iran must not be allowed to have any enrichment capacity whatever – did not appear spontaneously. The views that Cotton and the other Republicans have espoused on Iran were the product of assiduous lobbying by Israeli agents of influence using the inducement of promises of election funding and the threat of support for the members’ opponents in future elections.

Those members of Congress don’t arrive at their positions on issues related to Iran through discussion and debate among themselves. They are given their marching orders by AIPAC lobbyists, and time after time, they sign the letters and vote for legislation or resolution that they are given, as former AIPAC lobbyist MJ Rosenberg has recalled. This Israeli exercise of control over Congress on Iran and issues of concern to Israel resembles the Soviet direction of its satellite regimes and loyal Communist parties more than any democratic process, but with campaign contributions replacing the inducements that kept its bloc allies in line.

Cotton’s Loyalty to Israel

Rosenberg has reasoned that AIPAC must have drafted the letter and handed it to Senator Cotton. “Nothing happens on Capitol Hill related to Israel,” he tweets, “unless and until Howard Kohr (AIPAC chief) wants it to happen. Nothing.” AIPAC apparently supported the letter, but there may be more to the story. Senator Cotton just happens to be a protégé of neoconservative political kingpin Bill Kristol, whose Emergency Committee on Israel gave him nearly a million dollars late in his 2014 Senate campaign and guaranteed that Cotton would have the support of the four biggest funders of major anti-Iran organizations.

Cotton proved his absolute fealty to Likudist policy on Iran by sponsoring an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013 that would have punished violators of the sanctions against Iran with prison sentences of up to 20 years and extended the punishment to “a spouse and any relative, to the third degree” of the sanctions violator. In presenting the amendment in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Cotton provided the useful clarification that it would have included “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids”.

That amendment, which he apparently believed would best reflect his adoption of the Israeli view of how to cut Iran down to size, was unsuccessful, but it established his reliability in the eyes of the Republican Likudist kingmakers. Now Kristol is grooming him to be the vice-presidential nominee in 2016.

So the real story behind the letter from Cotton and his Republican colleagues is how the enforcers of Likudist policy on Iran used an ambitious young Republican politician to try to provoke a breakdown in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The issue it raises is a far more serious issue than the Logan Act, but thus far major news organizations have steered clear of that story.

Aipac? What a surprise

callen

rr165892 said:

BSL,thinking this stalemate in Govt is one sided is a bit short sighted.

RR Republicans openly stated they would block everything. Pretty one sided.

Last-12-Exit

Ive yet to see what is treasonous about that letter.

rr165892

callen said:

rr165892 said:

BSL,thinking this stalemate in Govt is one sided is a bit short sighted.

RR Republicans openly stated they would block everything. Pretty one sided.

True but the dems also put forward some assinine stuff as well.Its both sides Cal.

backseatLover12

Trying to shift bad publicity away from republicans isn't going to work for this topic. This is all on the republicans.

a5pj

Last daily show - showed how the Dems did the exact same thing while bush was in office (same people too). Politics per usual.

rr165892

a5pj said:

Last daily show - showed how the Dems did the exact same thing while bush was in office (same people too). Politics per usual.

Exactly