The Congress of the United States, last seen lounging in the noonday sun on a rock in the Potomac, bestirred its collective stump and actually did something on Wednesday. It overrode the president's veto of a bill that would allow the surviving family members of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue, among other people, the government of Saudi Arabia. It didn't just override the veto. It parked it somewhere west of the old Bull Run battlefield.

The White House went curiously bananas over this development, as the comments of press secretary Josh Earnest would indicate. From The Guardian:

"I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983," press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. "Ultimately these senators are going to have to answer their own conscience and their constituents as they account for their actions today."

Point The First: No. Not even close.

Point The Second: Does Earnest believe that a vote to allow widows and orphans to sue a government that played footsie—and, very likely, worse—with the people who murdered their loved ones would make a senator feel guilty, or that it would be unpopular out in the country? I'm no isolationist, god knows, but Earnest is just completely wrong here. There is still so much of that terrible day that is unlitigated in the national mind. This is just a piece of it.

I know all the arguments against it, although I'm less concerned than many people about the possibility of legal blowback. (I can't make a good argument that the families of an Iraqi prisoner ought not to be able to sue his torturer in any court that will have the case.) John Brennan's against it, which is another point in my favor. But, basically, I'm just tired of diplomatic niceties with ghastly authoritarian theocrats who are more interested in keeping themselves alive and the gravy train running than they are in keeping people around the world alive and in the debts they owe the people and the countries that keep them in power.

They're rattling their wallets at us, which is to be expected. Via El Arabiya:

"This should be clear to America and to the rest of the world: When one GCC state is targeted unfairly, the others stand around it," said Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, an Emirati Gulf specialist and professor of political science at United Arab Emirates University. "All the states will stand by Saudi Arabia in every way possible," he said.

And good for them. Let's ask Yemen for its opinion.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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