Foreign policy standards, checks and balances disappear with Trump and Risch in charge

As we celebrate our nation’s independence this month, it’s a time to reflect on the genius of the Founding Fathers, who wrote a Constitution that separated the powers of government into three branches, with a set of checks and balances that assured no one branch could run roughshod over the other. Fearing a president who would assume the powers of a monarch, they purposely infused the Congress with powers that checked the work of the president. Given President Donald Trump’s inclination to govern with a heavy hand and no limitations on his decision-making, the work of the framers seems particularly prescient.

That became crystal clear a few weeks ago, when the House Foreign Affairs Committee invited former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to testify and explain the foreign policy decision-making process under the Trump family dynasty. Tillerson’s departure was bizarre enough, notified by one of Trump’s tweets that he was no longer secretary of state, but what Tillerson revealed to the committee shows an administration that has departed from conventional diplomatic practice and opted for a bizarre and unprecedented approach to foreign policy.

Tillerson claimed that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law – who was denied top security clearance until his father-in-law stepped in and overruled the officials responsible for granting such clearance – set up a shadow foreign policy operation. Kushner has traveled the globe to meet with foreign leaders without seeking collaboration with or participation from the State Department, which has official responsibility for handling affairs with other nations in the promotion of America’s foreign policy.

According to Tillerson, both he and Secretary of Defense James Mattis were shut out of policy meetings by Kushner. Those who have followed the relationship between the White House and the State Department point to senior White House aides in the past who would oversee foreign policy issues, but none with as small a portfolio or as little experience as Kushner.

With no clear delineation of roles and responsibilities for first daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Tillerson’s description of foreign policy while he was secretary of state sounds like a free-for-all where a meeting with a foreign dignitary by a Trump family member becomes the latest official U.S. policy.

The media and the loyal opposition in the Democratic Party have become so inured to the Trump family’s personal diplomacy that Tillerson’s testimony garnered no more than one or two articles, and then it was on to the next day’s news coverage.

In Congress, you could hear a pin drop across the Rotunda in the meeting rooms of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Idaho’s own Sen. Jim Risch. Apparently, he sees his job as the Senate Republican who props up the Trump administration as it departs from standard diplomatic or foreign policy practice. Did it not occur to him that something was rotten as the Trump kids assumed substantial sway over official foreign policy of this nation? Did this not deserve a hearing, as the House Foreign Affairs Committee concluded?

Unfortunately, it did not, not in the highly partisan and polarized Congress that Risch seems so comfortable navigating these days. But it was not always this way. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a proud and distinguished record of serving as a check on the executive branch. Idaho figured prominently in the committee’s work in the 1970s, when Sen. Frank Church, serving on the Foreign Relations Committee for 16 years, was appointed to chair the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The committee was appointed after journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a New York Times story claiming that the CIA had been spying on anti-Vietnam War activists.

This and other moments of courageous oversight by Congress, such as Sen. William Fulbright’s hearings on the Vietnam War conducted between 1966 and 1971, are forgotten memories compared to the mild and meek ways of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. Fulbright, a Democrat, ignored party loyalty and took on a Democratic administration, a lesson in history lost on Risch, who makes his moves on partisan considerations alone.

Congressional committees have an important oversight function in Washington, and under Risch’s leadership, it has taken a nose dive. According to Foreign Affairs magazine, “from January to November 2018, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held just 14 full committee hearings not related to nominations, allowing the administration to overhaul U.S. foreign policy without the need to explain itself in public. In 2004, by contrast, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the late Richard Lugar of Indiana – a Republican overseeing a Republican administration – held 14 hearings in the first three months of the year, often chairing two hearings in one day.”

Risch will return to Idaho for another of his “trumped up” presentations to Idahoans where he extols his virtues as senator, applauds the work of Trump and dismisses contrarian thinking on all fronts. What will be missing from his next presentation is what he thinks of Tillerson’s experiences as secretary of state and its consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Run out of the hip pocket of the son-in-law Kushner – accountable to no one but Trump and operating under a cloak of secrecy – such behavior flies in the face of that Constitution the framers approved in 1789.

So the next time you think about Independence Day, think about the Trump family dynasty, defended by none other than Idaho’s own Risch, having declared independence from the Constitution of the United States, from the Senate and from the State Department, this nation’s foreign policy arm of government.

At this time of year, when we celebrate our nation’s independence, it’s high time that Idaho declares its independence from a U.S. senator who has rejected congressional oversight and blindly supports Trump’s efforts to rewrite the rules and practices of American foreign policy. It’s high time we return the United States of America and the state of Idaho to a day when the president and senators respected our Constitution and stood up for it.

This story was originally published July 5, 2019 at 4:32 PM.