The Corker Letter
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The new chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Corker, is off to a promising start with his letter to President Obama laying down a marker in respect of the United Nations. The Volunteer State Republican seeks clarification as to whether the President is going to take the Iran deal to the United Nations Security Council prior to the measure going to the Senate. It’s a good question to put to the president.
A warning that Iran could try to bind America via the Security Council was raised Thursday by the editor of the Sun in a New York Post column. For Mr. Obama’s pact with Iran is emerging from negotiations involving all five of the Security Council’s permanent members (plus Germany). The mullahs tipped their hand on this when they replied to a letter from 47 Republican senators, led by Thos. Cotton of Arkansas.
Stopping first at the United Nations isn’t sitting well with Mr. Corker. “Enabling the United Nations to consider an agreement or portions of it, while simultaneously threatening to veto legislation that would enable Congress to do the same, is a direct affront to the American people and seeks to undermine Congress’s appropriate role,” Mr. Corker writes to Mr. Obama. Where is Mr. Corker coming from?
Feature the way the point is marked by in 75 Federalist, when Alexander Hamilton was writing on the requirement that treaties be put to the Senate for ratification. “However proper or safe it may be in governments where the executive magistrate is an hereditary monarch, to commit to him the entire power of making treaties,” Hamilton wrote, “it would be utterly unsafe and improper to intrust that power to an elective magistrate of four years’ duration.”
Hamilton makes it clear that the Founders just didn’t entirely trust presidents. “A man raised from the station of a private citizen to the rank of chief magistrate, possessed of a moderate or slender fortune, and looking forward to a period not very remote when he may probably be obliged to return to the station from which he was taken, might sometimes be under temptations to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue to withstand,” he wrote.
The Federalist co-author was worried about, among other things, avarice. “The history of human conduct,” Hamilton explained, “does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”
John Jay, who wrote on treaties in 64 Federalist, reinforced this point, saying that it would take one committed cynic to imagine that a president and two thirds of the Senate could be corrupted. “The case is not supposable,” he wrote. “He must either have been very unfortunate in his intercourse with the world, or possess a heart very susceptible of such impressions, who can think it probable that the President and two thirds of the Senate will ever be capable of such unworthy conduct.”
What we like about the debate that has been stirred up by Senator Cotton — or for that matter, by President Obama — is that it has sent the solons onto their hands and knees with bristle brushes on the American bedrock. There it is plain that Senator Corker is on the firmest possible ground when he demands that the Iranian deal be brought to the Senate. He quotes Secretary of State Kerry as promising that any deal would have to “pass muster” with Congress. If there are those who don’t trust a president alone, they will find soul-mates among the Founders.