Congress and the President

As Price points out in his excellent article, the central issue we are facing in the current battle between Congress and the Administration is whether Congress is going to succeed in so paralyzing the President that America cannot act as a great power at a time when it is faced with urgent foreign policy issues.

I suggest that the majority Democrats do not give a damn, so long as they achieve their goal of destroying this presidency.

In passing the Boland Amendment, a constitutionally dubious law, the members of Congress attempted to usurp the President’s right to conduct foreign policy. Having no cogent policy of their own to substitute, they have succeeded in sowing utter confusion from Central America to the Persian Gulf.

Bare-fisted fighters when it comes to protecting their own political turf, they are a bunch of eunuchs when it is a matter of protecting U.S. interests abroad.

While they are trying to cut the President off at the knees, Nicaragua is becoming a Soviet base. While they whine and wring their hands about flagging a few Kuwaiti tankers with our colors to protect the West’s vital oil supplies, the Iranians sneer and become bolder.

I do not know how the televised farce called the Iran- contra hearings will end, but I fear the worst. Perhaps it is too late, but it might help curtail the mischief-making abilities of special prosecutors if the law creating the independent counsel as a regular feature of government is allowed to expire on constitutional grounds, as the Justice Department has suggested.

Far more important, the public should realize that a bunch of self-interested politicians with the enthusiastic aid of the liberal media are undermining not only the presidency, an office held by national mandate unlike their own, but also the credibility of the United States around the world.

ARTHUR HANSL

Pacific Palisades