To rational experts in Washington, the Senate’s ratification of the New START treaty with Russia was seen as the best and wisest next step to assure resumption of verifiable reductions of nuclear weapons, and to secure Russia’s cooperation in restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A raft of generals, all living former Republican Secretaries of State and former presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and his son all endorsed the treaty.
Never mind. The harsh Republican right wing and its astringent media chase hounds are now cranking out reams of criticism to tar the 13 Republican senators, including Tennessee’s Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, who rose above caustic partisanship to ratify the treaty a week ago by a 71-26 vote.
The far right’s most inflammatory propagandists, commentators like Glenn Beck and Dick Morris, are saying that the GOP senators who helped ratify the treaty are not just wrong, but that they are “traitors” – to what cause, we wonder – who should be targeted by their own party for defeat in coming elections.
Republican votes were, indeed, crucial to the ratification. Approval of a treaty requires the support of a two-thirds majority of the Senate, a bipartisan bloc of 67 senators. Sens. Corker and Alexander, Georgia’s Johnny Isakson, and Mississippi’s Thad Cochran – all pretty staunch Southern conservatives – were reasonably convinced through their own diligent efforts that the treaty is sound, and that the benefits far outweigh any perceived deficiencies.
Indiana’s Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the ranking Republican on the Senate’s foreign relations panel, Corker and Isakson all participated in exhaustive hearings before they voted to pass the treaty out of committee to the floor. And once on the floor, it was debated longer than any previous arms control treaty.
Corker, moreover, visited every national laboratory involved in nuclear weapons and consulted frequently at home and abroad with key leaders to explore the impact of the treaty on the nation’s security. Ultimately, he was satisfied that the provisions of the treaty were acceptable because they allowed for renewal of qualitative verification inspections of facilities, like those that ended with the expiration of the first START treaty last year; and because the treaty allowed the U.S. the right to withdraw from it unilaterally if its terms were not being met or if the nation’s interests were not being served.
He also demanded that the treaty be accompanied by a 10-year, $85 billion initiative to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for winding down the number of each nation’s deployed nuclear warheads and launchers (to 1,550 and 700, respectively) over the next seven years.
He further pointed out that the treaty allows the U.S. to retain its undeployed stock of an additional 3,500 nuclear weapons, and that President Obama had also committed to pursue a “robust” missile defense system.
A reasonable observer would believe that such conditions, along with the need to fortify a working relationship with Russia that is key to containing Iran’s nuclear program, would satisfy the Republicans’ hard-right critics on the merits of the treaty. But for further insurance, Corker also won passage of an amendment which asserts that the treaty’s preamble does not in any way inhibit the United States’ rights with regard to missile defense systems.
Alas, none of that defuses the criticism, distortions and falsehoods now being peddled by Beck, Morris and their ilk. In their view, any bipartisan effort to address critical issues, regardless of whether it is the right thing to do, is “apostasy,” a sell-out of the right-wing, tea-party orthodoxy. This is, of course, Luddism of the rankest sort. If it sticks with the new Republican House majority and a larger Senate minority next year, the prospects for sane, bipartisan government will be bleaker than ever.