http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/04/hastert-colombia/FLASHBACK: Hastert Traveled Abroad, Told Foreign Leaders Not To Listen To Clinton
President Bush yesterday said Speaker Pelosi’s bipartisan delegation to Syria sends “mixed signals,” implying that Pelosi overstepped her bounds by visiting Syria. Bush’s supporters have been repeating the argument:
Former ambassador John Bolton: “I would simply hope that people would understand that, under the Constitution, the president conducts foreign policy, not the speaker of the House.”
Former Gov. Mitt Romney: “It has long been the established principle of this country that the president of the United States leads our foreign policy. And if you don’t like the president, then you change him. But you don’t have the two parties each conducting foreign policy in the way they think it ought to be conducted.”
Thomas Sowell: “Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and — like him or not — he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.”
Speaker Pelosi has done nothing to suggest that she intended to speak on behalf of President Bush or the U.S. Government. But her predecessors haven’t been so respectful.
In 1997, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) led a delegation to Colombia and specifically encouraged military officials there to “bypass” President Clinton and “communicate directly with Congress.”
At the same time Congress was attaching human rights conditions to U.S. security assistance programs and negotiating a formal end-use monitoring agreement with the Colombian defense ministry, other lawmakers were secretly assuring Colombian officials that they felt such restrictions were unwarranted, and would work to either remove the conditions or limit their effectiveness.
One example of this was a congressional delegation led by Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) which met with Colombian military officials, promising to “remove conditions on assistance” and complaining about “leftist-dominated” U.S. congresses of years past that “used human rights as an excuse to aid the left in other countries.”
Hastert said he would to correct this situation and expedite aid to countries allied in the war on drugs and also encouraged Colombian military officials to “bypass the U.S. executive branch and communicate directly with Congress.” Subsequently, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette sent a cable complaining that Hastert told Colombian military officials to “take a tough line and wait for
insistence on human rights conditions to be overwhelmed by the pressure of events,” saying it had undermined his leverage with the Colombian military leadership.
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