In June 2009, Mr. Kerry again went to bat for the dark side, this time in Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya, an ally of Hugo Chávez, had been unconstitutionally trying to extend his time in office. The Honduran Supreme Court ordered the military to arrest him. All the other branches of government, the Catholic Church, Honduras’s human-rights ombudsman and Mr. Zelaya’s own party backed the court’s decision.

Mr. Chávez, Fidel Castro and the Obama administration became furious, called it a “coup d’état” and moved to isolate the tiny country. When Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) planned a fact-finding trip to Tegucigalpa, Mr. Kerry’s office tried to stop him by blocking funding. When the Law Library of Congress concluded that the Honduran high court had acted legally, Mr. Kerry wrote to the head of the library demanding that the opinion be retracted and “corrected.” In the spring of 2010, a Kerry staffer traveled to Honduras to pressure officials there to adopt the Obama administration’s “coup” narrative.

It is also worth recalling that Mr. Kerry’s running mate in 2004, John Edwards, promised to force the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the Kerry-Edwards ticket won the White House.