Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski gamely tried to confront Senator Ted Cruz on Tuesday over a letter he and 46 other GOP senators sent to Iran over its nuclear program.
The letter, sent last week to tell Iran’s leaders to inform them that Republicans wouldn’t feel bound by an Iran deal that doesn’t pass Congress, was blasted by the White House and called treasonous by some media outlets.
Brzezinski has railed against the letter every morning since it was sent, and when Cruz appeared on her program, she immediately laid into him. She pushed him on what he thought about Iranian hard liners using the letter to scuttle the talks and asked if it was “intended to get in the way of a deal.”
“It was intended to stop a bad deal — absolutely,” Cruz replied. “The idea that hard liners are using it is utter silliness. If we actually had negotiators that were trying to defend our national security, if anything the letter would help them, because what the letter makes clear is for any deal to be binding, it has to go through Congress.”
“I’m still talk about the fact that you are saying to me that what’s happening now in terms of the hard liners using the letter to stall on these negotiations was actually a part of your intention,” Brzezinski said. “It just seems extremely destructive.”
“Let me ask you something, Mika,” Cruz said. “Is it your position that it’s inappropriate for Congress to rein in the president on foreign policy?”
“I think it’s not inappropriate for Congress to have a say and to have a voice,” she continued. ”But to interfere with a negotiation with Iran, and to actually possibly even undermine a deal in the making — basically the next step to that is to just get right down the road to war.”
“No, it’s not,” Joe Scarborough jumped in. “The choice is not between war and a bad deal . . . Why is it so hard for you to believe that there is a lot of us that think that a bad deal is worse than no deal at all?”
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