More information concerning the Logan Act from an article by Steven Nelson in US News & World Report:




GOP Senators Probably Broke Law With Iran Letter

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., recruited nearly half of his colleagues in the Senate to sign a letter warning Iran's leaders they may oppose a nuclear deal.

Senators who reached out to Iran’s leaders to undermine President Barack Obama’s nuclear negotiations probably broke the law, and they're going to get away with it.

The law they probably broke, the Logan Act of 1799, allows for fines and up to three years in prison.

The act bans U.S. citizens from engaging “without authority of the United States” in “correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government ... with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government ... in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States.”

Fortunately for Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and the 46 Senate co-signers of his open letter to Iran, the law is not enforced and is likely unconstitutional.

“They probably were in violation of the act, yes,” says Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, probably broke the law, too, by working with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undermine the nuclear negotiations with Iran, he says.

But Vladeck, co-editor-in-chief of the legal blog Just Security, says senators could argue they were indeed acting with the authority of the United States or more convincingly that the act violates the First Amendment.

“The Logan Act is a vestigial and anachronistic holdover from a bygone era,” he says. “There's never been a successful prosecution under the act, and the last indictment was in 1803."

[b]Jonathan Turley, a law professor at the George Washington University, says "if the Logan Act was ever enforced you would have to frog march half of Congress out the front doors and into a federal penitentiary."[b]

Turley compares the likelihood of a prosecution under the act to “the chances of being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex on Capitol Hill.”

“The Logan Act comes from a rather dark period in which this country imposed the Alien and Sedition Acts,” he says. “The language of the Logan Act is sweeping and in my view facially unconstitutional.”
A spokeswoman for Cotton did not respond to a request for comment.

The obscure, unenforced act periodically becomes a topic of conversation, such as when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2007, and likely will continue to do so until it’s repealed.



I kind of like the visual of "frog marching half of Congress out the front doors and into a federal penitentiary". Maybe we should enforce the law.

Worth a read......

The 47 Republican signatories to an open letter discouraging the Iranian government from striking a nuclear deal with the Obama administration have been denounced for committing a broad spectrum of infractions: from the conceptual misdemeanor of embarrassing the president as he conducts U.S. foreign policy to genuine felonies like violating the Logan Act—which prohibits individuals from conducting freelance diplomacy with foreign governments—and outright treason.

These critics are so fixated on the form of the action these senators took that they’ve drowned out most substantive criticisms of its inept strategy and the GOP’s unspoken foreign policy objective—regime change in Iran. With respect to both the merits of the accusations, and the direction of their focus, they’re also wrong.

To see why, consider these two thought experiments.

First, imagine that Senator Tom Cotton, who drafted the offending document, had written it as an opinion column rather than an open letter. Senate Republicans didn’t send the Iranian government any private correspondence as far as we know. They didn’t “send” anything at all, really, except perhaps to select reporters. They issued a press release, and then slapped the equivalent of “Dear Sirs” on top of it. If 47 Republican senators had instead co-bylined an op-ed containing all of the same factual information that appears in the letter, and with Iranian officials as its intended audience, nobody would’ve questioned its legality or legitimacy.

The letter begins, “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to bring to your attention two features of our Constitution.” This is a genuinely preposterous supposition. But imagine it appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section rendered as, “It has come to our attention while observing nuclear negotiations between our government and the government of Iran that some of the parties may not fully understand our constitutional system. Thus, we are writing to raise awareness of two features of our Constitution.”

This would have been a terrible, tedious op-ed. Its subversiveness might have caused a stir. But I can’t imagine anyone would have called it treasonous.

Cotton’s execution here was reckless and feckless in equal measure. And yes, it’s unconventional for a partisan congressional caucus to undermine a sitting president’s foreign policy like this. But you can’t untangle his tactics from his goals unless you’re willing to accept a certain level of congressional abdication from foreign policy under all circumstances. What makes Cotton reckless isn’t so much that he’s willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve his purpose. Its that his purpose is extremely unwise.

Not everyone in Congress has such bad ideas. In 2003, too many Democrats voted to grant President George W. Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq. This was a generational error. We’d all be better off today if they’d refused, and that wouldn’t have violated any vaunted foreign policy norms. But what if convincing fellow Senate Democrats to resist the Bush administration required extraordinary interference? If a Democrat had read conflicting weapons of mass destruction intelligence into the record on the Senate floor and warned the British government and other allies that Bush was manipulating them into war. This would’ve ruptured the normative foundations of foreign policy like an earthquake. It also would have been protected by the Constitution, and worth the damage.

An alternate history in which a meddling Democrat derails (or merely disrupts) war with Iraq must also include the fact that Republicans like Tom Cotton would have called him a traitor. And that they’d probably have destroyed his political career—especially if the effort had been successful, and thus never vindicated by a disastrous war.

But hypocrisy is beside the point. What matters is whether Republicans today are acting out of a sense of public duty, and whether their objectives are wise and achievable.I think scuttling a deal to clear the path to regime change is both irresponsible and far-fetched. I also think the atmospherics surrounding the letter itself—that it was written by an ambitious Republican freshman, that GOP presidential hopefuls signed the letter but moderates and experienced foreign policy hands did not, that Cotton is hoping to recruit Republican signatories outside the Senate—suggests Cotton is engaging in intra-coalition politics, rather than solely advancing his substantive foreign policy goals.

Last edited by TheLagerLad (3/11/2015 12:53 pm)

'Thought experiments',.............I like it!

I mostly agree with what the article says, but the Bush/Iraq war thing sounds a little off to me. How could members of Congress be against the Iraq war if they didn't know they were being lied to at the time? I'm sure there were some who were against it simply because they are generally against war, but back then, they didn't have the luxury of hindsight yet.

In my opinion, what makes Cotton reckless and unwise is the fact that he doesn't seem to know when he should or shouldn't be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve a purpose. The ability to know the difference is important.

florentine wrote:

BYOB wrote:

What the hell is with these people wanting to fight everybody all the time?! There is a good quote that says - "If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies." By that parameter, you can tell who's really interested in peace and who's not.

They are itching for a war. They want Armageddon because they think it will bring on the Rapture and they will float to Heaven. They want to fulfill their Biblical prophesy. They don't care about soldiers, their families, civilians or anyone who gets hurt or killed. They care only for themselves.
 

If it's war they want, by all means they should hop on a plane to Iraq or Syria. I heard you can sneak in through Turkey.

It does make one wonder why his fellow Republicans did let him do this. Is it because they are using some type of weird reverse psychology to out him as a nut to get him and any credibility he had kind of out of their way for the future? I'm stumped. Or are they just all hyped up on a Netanyahu speech high like a bunch of meth heads?