Thursday, September 8, 2016

The Honorable Secretary: Treaty Power is Your Power!

Dictators Need Not Apply

Jazz Shaw: "Was there an amendment to the Constitution in the past few years that I missed? Entering into treaties isn’t exactly the exclusive province of the White House, or so I was assured in high school. But the administration doesn’t seem to be about to let a little thing like that slow his roll. It’s all just another executive action. (Washington Times:) "White House senior adviser Brian Deese said the president has the legal authority to ratify the accord without the two-thirds Senate vote required for treaties. He said the pact negotiated by 195 countries in December is merely an “executive agreement.”

You can call it an accord or an agreement or whatever you like, but if there are multiple nations signing on to an agreement for action of any sort which would commit the United States to any policy which would keep us in compliance with it, then it’s a treaty. And the Founders were very specific in how they chose to handle the power and responsibility inherent in locking us into deals with other nations. Both the President and a significant majority of the Senate need to be in agreement. This was a serious bone of contention in the early days of the union, and even though he held some reservations, Hamilton eventually clarified the legal rationale for why both branches must be involved when he wrote Federalist 75: "The power of making treaties is, plainly, neither the one [legislative] nor the other [executive]. It relates neither to the execution of the subsisting laws, nor to the enaction of new ones; and still less to an exertion of the common strength. ...They are not rules prescribed by the sovereign to the subject, but agreements between sovereign and sovereign. The power in question seems therefore to form a distinct department, and to belong, properly, neither to the legislative nor to the executive."" ...............

Who are we to believe; Alexander Hamilton or White House senior adviser Brian Deese? It's a real conundrum.

Writing in the newspapers as Publius, Hamilton believed that Americans were entitled to and capable of understanding the principles behind their proposed Constitution. He wrote this to you and me:

"...[I]t would be utterly unsafe and improper to entrust that [Treaty] power to an elective magistrate of four years' duration. ... An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth [Wa$$up, Madame $ecretary!] An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a ...President of the United States."

Claudia Rosett: "...China dealt with the Paris Agreement as a treaty -- which it clearly is -- and at least went through the motions of getting approval from a rubber-stamp legislature. Obama, faced with a genuinely elected legislature in which the Senate would almost certainly have rejected the Paris Agreement, decided to handle this erstwhile planetary "turning point" as a mere embellishment on a previous treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which entered into force in 1994.

So the "ratification" document Obama brought with him to China was the product of one of his pen-and-phone executive actions, offering to the UN secretary-general a commitment Obama was not entitled to make, and which American voters had never agreed to.

Following such stunts as the Iran nuclear deal (which Obama hustled to the UN for approval, but never submitted to the Senate as a treaty), this is becoming a new norm that is, in itself, profoundly dangerous to the foundations of the American republic. Obama's job, summed up in the oath he swore when taking office (twice), is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." The Constitution requires that a president make treaties only with the "Advice and Consent of the Senate," where a two-thirds majority is required for ratification."..............

Obama is trying to have it both ways: "This is an Executive Agreement and I don't need the Senate--but if I do, they already approved it in 1994!" Which is also how Democrats cram their favorite policies into the Constitution, the ones they can't get voters to consent to; "You already approved of men in your daughter's locker room in 1867--remember?"

The Framers therefore put a 2/3rds Senate supermajority requirement in the Constitution, so "that the people of America would have greater security against an improper use of the power of making treaties...". A 'safety in numbers' concept that would ensure that any treaty was widely accepted and beneficial.

That's two thirds of the American Senate...not the Iranian senate.
Or the UN Security Council.
Or the G-20 Summit.
Obama, the first Anti-American president, thinks America should be ruled by the World, not by the People.

The whole gist of our Constitution is to divide power to keep government limited--in order to protect your freedom. Obama believes in Unlimited Government and his own Undivided Power. Your freedom is his obstacle.

The Iranian Unconditional Surrender Treaty and the Climate Worship Treaty have something in common; they both require America to kowtow and pay tribute money. But the Iranian Surrender is worse, as it actively assists our enemies in terrorism and attaining nuclear ICBMs to point at us.

The honorable Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton: "An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents."

It's as if he knew Barack Hussein Obama.


"Don't make me pull over this horse and buggy!"

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