Let’s start with the claims made by Obama and Hillary Clinton. No, the 47 senators don’t want to “help Iran” or want the same thing as Iran “hardliners.” They want to gum up the negotiations with Iran because they believe your administration has been too easy on Iran. The Republican senators want stronger sanctions and tougher requirements. They want to cripple Iran’s nuclear program—precisely the opposite of what Iran’s hardliners want.

Let’s also be clear that the 47 Republicans didn’t negotiate with the ayatollahs. They wrote an open letter—really an op-ed, conveying their concern that the Obama administration is essentially negotiating an international treaty without seeking Senate ratification. Unlike the Logan Act nonsense, this is a serious argument involving separation of powers, which Obama often treats as an inconvenience instead of a hallowed constitutional doctrine.

As for calling Tom Cotton a traitor—this is a man who, after graduating from Harvard Law School, enlisted in the U.S. Army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan—that’s just, well, Orwellian. Having said all that, if Sen. Cotton or his 46 co-signatories had sought my counsel, I would have advised against writing the letter in that form. I found it politically tone deaf, disrespectful to the nation’s elected president, confusing to America’s allies—and counter-productive.

But demonizing those senators is a much greater offense. The end of civil discourse doesn’t just make political compromise in Washington harder. It makes it hard to remember why we’re fighting about these things in the first place.