opinion

Bill Schuette: Let Michigan take on Iran

Until Todd Courser's ingenious plan to "inoculate the herd" against the disclosure of his extracurricular canoodling with fellow state Rep. Cindy Gamrat misfired, Lansing's worst-kept secret was the unsated political ambitions of state Attorney General Bill Schuette.

But conventional wisdom had Schuette measuring drapes for the governor's office. Now it seems he may be more interested in succeeding John Kerry as the next U.S. Secretary of State.

Perhaps I'm overreacting. But how else to make sense of Schuette's bizarre states' rights campaign to sabotage the Obama administration's proposed agreement with Iran?

In a letter that surely left many of the 50 state governors to whom it was addressed scratching their heads, Schuette and another politically ambitious Republican, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, urged governors to frustrate the White House's intention to lift economic sanctions on Iran by continuing to enforce state boycotts or, in the case of 25 states that never established their own sanctions, enacting new ones.

Schuette and Pruitt acknowledged that the U.S. State Department might look askance at such an effort to subvert federal foreign policy. But they insisted that the Obama administration and five other world powers negotiated with Iran on the deal, "which is inferior in legal force to a treaty, and lacks the congressional approval required by the Constitution," and so "cannot bind the states."

But if the U.S. government can't promise other countries they can engage in legal trade with Americans, who can?

"The people, through the states, may come to their own decisions regarding sanctions on Iran," Schuette and Pruitt answer in their letter. Because, really, wouldn't we all be safer if sensitive national security matters were in the hands of seasoned foreign policy experts like Bill and Scott (or Todd and Cindy)?

Those with even a dim memory of eighth-grade social studies might recall that this is, in fact, one of the fundamental problems the U.S. Constitution was conceived to address.

Under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution, the states had struck their own agreements with various Native American tribes, ignored their obligations under the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War, and generally asserted their local interests to prevent the articulation of any coherent national interest. The whole point of vesting authority in a federal executive was to end the practice of each state pursuing its own foreign policy.

My first impulse was to suggest that Schuette and Pruitt need a refresher course in American civics almost as urgently as does Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk who asserted that her own religious convictions exempted her from enforcing federal law.

But although Schuette has often expressed solidarity with fundamentalists opposed to U.S. Supreme Court rulings upholding same-sex marriage, Obamacare and abortion, he has always been too pragmatic to indulge in civil disobedience once his legal remedies are exhausted.

In mounting a state's states' rights rebellion against the Obama administration's foreign policy, he has borrowed a page not from Kim Davis, but from Donald Trump, who has hogged the news cycle from his less-cartoonish presidential rivals all summer merely by managing to say something outrageously nonsensical every few hours.

Schuette lacks Trump's theatricality and manic capacity for outrage. But he shares the real estate mogul's contempt for the average voter's attention span and understands that in an arena crowded with politicians seeking a piece of the news cycle, making a splash is way more important than making sense.

The problem for Schuette is that provocateurs like Trump are constantly upping the ante. The same week Schuette proposed the boycotting of Iran, Trump was talking about boycotting Oreos, and Mike Huckabee was threatening to self-incarcerate on Kim Davis' behalf. That's a lot of crazy in one kitchen.

Maybe Schuette needs to dial up his anti-Iran message by proposing something a little more muscular than economic sanctions. How about a Michigan-led air strike to take out an Iranian reactor or two? What with state militia members from Michigan, Tennessee and Kentucky collaborating in a Bay of Pigs-style incursion to overthrow the leader of ISIS, whoever he is?

After all, anyone seeking elective office can do crazy. But can Schuette do crazy with the big boys?

I got a bag of Oreos and a contempt-of-court citation says Michigan's attorney general is playing out of his league.

Contact Brian Dickerson: 313-222-6584 or bdickerson@freepress.com.