Liberals Propose 
Fast Tracking Treaties
Sunday, February 8, 2009
By Cliff Kincaid
NewsWithViews.com
United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea
|
The liberal Brookings Institution has come up with a controversial way to
get costly and unpopular treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate. Their answer
is to bypass the constitutional requirement that treaties obtain two-thirds
of the vote of the Senate before passage by redefining the treaties as
statutes. Then, they would only need a bare majority for passage in both
Houses of Congress, which just happen to be controlled by Democrats.
Such an
approach would mean quicker and easier passage of controversial and
expensive measures that, if debated as treaties in the Senate, might take
too long and upset and alarm too many Americans.
By submitting a new global warming treaty as a statute, the Brookings scholars argue,
the Congress can act more quickly on the measure.
They specifically cite a U.N. climate conference scheduled for December, “when
the international community is scheduled to gather in Copenhagen, Denmark,
to negotiate a replacement for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.” The new
agreement that comes out of this, they suggest, should be a statute, not
a treaty, even though the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was a treaty.
Brookings scholars William J. Antholis and Nigel Purvis say that the U.S. must quickly
transform its domestic and international energy policy and come into line
with international demands. “To reclaim global leadership, the United
States must show the world proof that it has the political will to curb
greenhouse gases,” they say.
The “political will” would be a power grab by Obama and his liberal
allies in Congress. Left unsaid is the fact that this is obviously a way
to cut conservative Republican Senators out of the process and forge a
bare majority of Senators in favor of controversial treaties.
They say that “…in consultation with Congress, the president would
decide that future climate and energy agreements are to be approved by
the United States by statute rather than as treaties.” In other
words, Obama would decide, after getting the approval of leading Democrats
in Congress, that he won’t submit the new U.N. climate treaty as
a treaty. Instead, he would submit it as just a statute. This would obviously
make passage much easier.
They argue that all of this can be accomplished under the rubric of a new “Climate
Protection Authority” that Obama should adopt.
“Domestically, the president’s public approval and congressional majorities may
never be as high,” they note, in an obvious reference to Obama’s
Democratic edge in both congressional bodies.
The implication is that Obama has to act now, bypassing Senate conservatives,
especially Republicans, by implementing the “Climate Protection
Authority” and then submitting “future climate and energy
agreements” as statutes rather than as treaties.
It must be done now, rather than later, the Brookings scholars argue, because
the prospect of “regulating greenhouse gases could fade if the economy
continues to worsen.”
In other words, expensive and costly prohibitions of energy use might be tougher
to impose if peoples’ living and working conditions continue to
deteriorate.
This approach is needed, they argue, because other nations “distrust
our treaty-making process.” They explain, “These countries
are reluctant to make politically difficult concessions only to see the
United States stay out of the agreement in the end.”
Translated into common language, this means that the treaty process takes too long
and the treaty may ultimately be rejected by Senators reacting to popular
pressure.
Antholis is Managing Director of the Brookings Institution, while Purvis, a former
State Department official, is a Nonresident Brookings Scholar on Environment
and Development and Foreign Policy.
Purvis also runs a group, Climate Advisers, dedicated to “shaping the low
carbon economy.” Its website declared, “Internationally, we
have strong ties to government officials in the world’s major economies
and multilateral institutions.”
The firm
is dedicated to helping clients, which are not named, to developing
“profitable strategies” and identifying “concrete investment
opportunities in rapidly growing international markets for carbon-denominated
securities.”
So he has a vested financial interest in seeing the theory of man-made global
warming imposed on the U.S. and the world.
Arguing for the abandonment of the constitutional requirement that treaties get
two-thirds approval, they explain, “Statutes require a majority
in both houses of Congress, whereas treaties require two-thirds of only
the Senate. Federal courts have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality
of bicameral statutory approval of international pacts. In fact, the United
States enters into more international agreements this way than by treaty,
including some arms control agreements and environmental pacts and almost
all trade deals.”
This point is at least partly true. For example, President Clinton submitted
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a statute, not a treaty,
after he realized that he didn’t have the two-thirds vote in the
Senate to pass it.
This logic, of course, might be applied to other controversial treaties, including
the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOST), the Convention on the Rights
of the Child, and the International Criminal Court.
Will Obama do it? With the backing of a major liberal think tank with Democratic
Party connections like Brookings, it might be tempting, even irresistible.
Susan Rice, Obama’s close foreign policy adviser and now his U.S. Ambassador
to the U.N., was a senior fellow at Brookings from 2002 to 2009.
The head of Brookings, former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott,
is a proponent of “global governance” who recently
told the German Der Spiegel magazine that Obama attempted
“to shift from an American identity to a global one” when
he made that Berlin speech in which “he called himself a citizen
of the world.”
Cliff Kincaid, a veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff concentrated in journalism and communications at the University of Toledo, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
He has written or co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign policy issues.
Cliff has appeared on Hannity & Colmes, The O’Reilly Factor, Crossfire and has been published in the Washington Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events and Insight.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
|
