We’ll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes, and the losers accepting majority decisions.
Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.
Second, we will never accept global governance because it inevitably devolves into corruption. The panoply of UN scandals flows from a single source: the lack of democratic accountability. These supranational organizations exist in their own insular, self-indulgent aerie.
We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.
Fourth, we understand that these mushy international organizations liberate the barbaric and handcuff the civilized. Bodies like the U.N. can toss hapless resolutions at the Milosevices, the Saddams, or the butchers of Darfur, but they can do nothing to restrain them. Meanwhile, the forces of decency can be paralyzed as they wait for “the international community.”
Fifth, we know that when push comes to shove, all the grand talk about international norms is often just a cover for opposing the global elite’s betes noires of the moment—usually the U.S. or Israel. We will never grant legitimacy to forums that are so often manipulated for partisan ends.35
David Brooks is right, but there’s more. As a nation of states, it took us a long time to become a cohesive nation, trustful of all our fellow citizens. Indeed, before the American people came to trust one another fully in sharing our national sovereignty, we went through a cleansing process from 1861 to 1865—the American Civil War. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, we could no longer exist “half slave and half free.” He quoted the biblical prophecy that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
The states of the North—led by the unerring moral compass of the abolitionists—rejected the idea that they would have to share their country with slaveholders and the vast, feudal, class-conscious estates they ruled. The “slave power” became the enemy of the North and people of conscience were determined to purge it from America.
And they did.
As with the United Nations’ General Assembly, the slave power perpetuated its rule through the principle of one-state, one-vote in the US Senate. Southern defenders of slavery made sure that the number of free and slave states were equal so that they would not be outvoted in the Senate (increased population growth in the North made the House of Representatives an increasingly antislavery institution). Whenever a free state was admitted to the Union, for example Maine in 1820, a slave state (in 1820, Missouri) would be let in to offset it. When the Supreme Court ruled—in the Dred Scott decision of 1857—that Congress could not bar slavery in any territory, it led directly to the Civil War. The North would not subsist in a nation that permanently tolerated the spread of slavery.
Even in modern times, the civil rights movement fought to extirpate racial segregation from the southern states, eventually bringing them into conformity with the racial integration (sort of) practiced in the North.
Don’t we have a similar duty? Mustn’t we make sure that we are entering a world of free nations based on the rule of law, integrity, and respect for human rights that we fought so hard for before we sign away our sovereignty? That is not to say that we should undertake any global crusade to liberate and improve the world. But it is to say that we should look before we leap and check out to what kind of countries we are ceding our sovereignty.
Do we want to be in a global ruling partnership with Russia, China, or a collection of tiny, lightly populated, third world autocracies, riddled with corruption and dedicated to the enrichment of their leaders? These are not the kind of bedfellows we want in our government. They are not worthy of entrusting our sovereignty to them.
And we will not accept them.
Join us in this urgent fight to maintain our sovereignty and stop the forces of global governance.
But, if you do, be prepared to be identified as one of the “black helicopter crowd.”
You’ll be in good company.
TREATIES: HOW THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WANTS TO UNDERMINE OUR SOVEREIGNTY
UN treaties are a favorite way of circumventing our national government and transferring our power, control, and resources to a new global entity. And the Obama administration is determined to destroy the very essence of our national sovereignty and transfer power from our elected Congress to the UN General Assembly—a body filled with corrupt, undemocratic, tyrannical nations that abuse human rights and do not share our values.
If Barack Obama is reelected in November 2012, his agenda for global governance through the United Nations will pick up steam. But even if he is defeated—or especially if he is defeated—he and his outgoing secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, are planning to use his remaining months in office to sign a series of treaties and international protocols that will bind our country for decades to come. We need to remember one fundamental but little known fact: Any treaty signed by the US but not yet ratified by the Senate is binding on our country—as if it had been ratified—until it is either rejected by the Senate or renounced by the president. This requirement— embedded in the Vienna Convention signed and ratified by the US—means that these treaties might come into force and effect even if we never ratify them.
Frank Gaffney, who was assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and currently heads the Center for Security Policy, explains the curious fact that we are bound by treaties even if we don’t ratify them. “The Vienna Convention governing the status of treaties—to which we are a party—requires states that sign a treaty to refrain from any actions that undermine the treaty pending ratification until such time as a formal renunciation of the treaty is made. In practice, this is done by the State Department. This translates into actual compliance with the treaty including often paying the dues we would be obliged to pay once we are parties [to the treaty after ratification].”36
Because of the Vienna Convention, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid need not bring these treaties up for ratification if he feels he lacks the votes to pass them. Then, if the Democrats keep the Senate and Obama is reelected, these treaties will remain in force throughout his second term—never voted down (or up) by the Senate or renounced by the president. Our only remedy then, will be to defeat Obama and/or capture the Senate.
Nevertheless, Obama and Hillary Clinton are very anxious to get as many of these treaties as possible ratified in the lame duck session of Congress, after November but before the results of the 2012 election come into play. Even though some of these treaties have been kicking around for thirty years, they know that this might be their last chance to put into place key elements of their global governance plan.
One other reason that the treaties have become such a high priority is that Senator John Kerry chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is trying out for the position of next secretary of state. He is anxious to show how he can deliver the left’s agenda.
But Obama need not rely on the Vienna Convention since some of these treaties might get through in the lame-duck session of Congress that will meet after the election results are in. Even if the Republicans take control of the Senate, it won’t matter at all because it will be the outgoing, defeated Democratic senators who will vote on these treaties. Immunized by their defeats from public pressure—and possibly embittered by their losses—they will willingly vote to hogtie the United States and approve the massive grant of sovereignty to the United Nations.
Obama and Clinton are feverishly negotiating treaties—with very little public attention—and lining up votes for Senate ratification of numerous treaties.
Once these treaties are passed, they are the law of the United States forever.
That’s why we need to stop them.
Laws can be repealed, but treaties cannot. The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution characterizes all treaties as “the supreme law of the land” akin to constitutional provisions. Treaties supersede acts of Congress or
