Posted on 07/19/2018 11:18:48 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
As Donald Trump abdicates U.S. leadership and dismantles the democratic international order, prospects for global cooperation look bleak. Fortunately, America is more than Washington and the United States is more than the federal government. Around the nation, governors are going global. In states both red and blue, they are engaging governments abroad, partnering with foreign provinces, and promoting cross-border trade and action on climate change. The White House may be in retreat, but statehouses are not about to turn their back on globalization.
At the forefront of this activism is the National Governors Association (NGA), which begins its annual summer meeting today in New Mexico. The organization is a venerable body, founded in 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt, then governor of New York. Until recently, it focused overwhelmingly on domestic matters. That has changed because the international has become the domestic.
Today, governors recognize that they cannot advance the interests of their constituents without a global perspective and global linkages. Beyond organizing trade and investment missions abroad and arranging visits from foreign delegations, they are lobbying the U.S. government and foreign governments to pursue policies to advance shared security, prosperity, and the well-being of the planet.
Beyond these “push” factors has been the “pull” from abroad in the wake of Trump’s election. Confronting a nationalist, nativist, populist, protectionist, and unilateral administration, foreign governments as well as foreign provinces and private corporations, have looked outside Washington for partners to do business with until America’s Trump fever breaks. At times, they have cultivated U.S. states as counterweights to the White House. A case in point is the tacit alliance that Canada and Mexico have crafted with U.S. border and exporting states to preserve the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Much of this state activism is bipartisan. Few governors support Trump’s trade war with Europe and China, for example, fearing a retaliatory spiral that hurts consumers, producers, and workers. On other issues, partisan fissures emerge. When Trump renounced the Paris Accord, Democratic governors Jerry Brown of California, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Andrew Cuomo of New York announced the formation of a Climate Alliance, pledging to stay “in” the pact. Several days later, Brown traveled to China to explore “bilateral” cooperation to mitigate global warming, receiving a welcome from President Xi Jinping that was fit for a head of state.
In response to the surging interest of governors in international affairs, along with growing demands from foreign partners, NGA executive director Scott Pattison created a new office whose mission is to provide “opportunities for governors to convene and collaborate with their counterparts across the globe, including heads of state, global thought leaders and foreign executives.” As the NGA explains, “The time for governors to take a leadership role in international engagement is now.” The agenda for the New Mexico meeting reflects this new priority, devoting a third of its sessions to international themes, including how governors can conduct diplomacy with the world from their own desks and advice on strengthening economic ties to China.
Given all this ferment, should we expect each state to have its own foreign policy? On one level, one should not get carried away. The Constitution, after all, gives the federal government pride of place in foreign, security, trade, and immigration policy, notwithstanding those powers that the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states. While states can approve statutes with international implications, the supremacy clause means that federal law typically trumps state law when the two conflict.
Nevertheless, global activism by U.S. states (as well as cities) is vast and growing. In the past decade alone, note David Engstrom and Jeremy Weinstein of Stanford University, U.S. states have signed more than 200 compacts with foreign governments, ignoring requirements for Senate approval. Some of the most significant are regional cap-and-trade agreements linking U.S. states to foreign governments and provinces. But U.S. state (as well as municipal) activism has also grown in areas of human rights, digital privacy, and immigration policy.
In a transnational world of webs and networks, we should not be surprised that U.S. international engagement increasingly comes from below the federal level. States have long been considered “laboratories of democracy,” in the famous phrase of Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Today, they are emerging as engines of internationalism.
Diplomatic purists may bemoan this trend, running athwart as it does the ideal of a unitary state capable of speaking with “one voice” abroad. What becomes of the coherence and consistency of U.S. foreign policy when there are competing American strands of global engagement?
A more optimistic perspective welcomes this cacophony as a sign of vitality within America’s plural political system. The Constitution has been described as “an invitation to struggle.” This applies not only to the separation of powers among three coequal branches of government but to the pulling and hauling between national and state governments within the U.S. federal system. The doctrine of “states’ rights” has long been a rallying cry among conservatives. But in the age of Trump, we shouldn’t be surprised that progressives have also taken up the chant.
A lot of scare words but the bottom line is this. They adhere to the Constitution and believe the SCOTUS has the last word. Then everything else is just a manifestation of ‘states rights’.
Oh, DJT is leading the world. He’s just doing it differently. These NWO/globalists are just pissed at that.
There is no longer a “United” States of America. Our nation is too badly eroded and destroyed by years of corrupt governance and the treachery of the Marxist left
There exists a Republic, in spirit more than anything. The Trump base is loyal and patriotic but we are being opposed and vilified by the lying fake news media
“dismantles the democratic international order”?
What democratic international order, the last time I checked about 90 percent or more of the worlds people are ruled by murderous dictators or juntas.
The Left wing state governments are working to hobble their economies while the Capitalist oriented states are glorying in the freeing of theirs. Ultimately California and Washington et all will demand that the rest of the country must join them in their depravity or finance that depravity so that their Utopias don’t crumble away.
The States are expressly prohibited from engaging in Foreign Policy. Sorry, I don’t have time at the moment to provide the reference however I will look it up because it needs to be known apparently.
I agree with you.
Everyone seems to want to get in on the act these days too.
Obama keeps going abroad as if he sets our policies.
It’s time to warn these folks or take legal action against them for trying to conduct U. S. foreign policy.
“climate change” comes up in the first paragraph - no surprise.
here’s globalist Patrick in 2015:
4 Dec 2015: CFR: Stewart Patrick: Combating Climate Change Beyond Paris
The UN climate talks in Paris are just one part of the international climate policy regime, write Stewart Patrick, director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance, and Research Associate Naomi Egel. In this post, part of our ongoing guest series on the Paris summit, they note other institutions contributing to the climate policy process and highlight several climate policy options from CFR’s Global Governance Monitor...
More effective alternatives to the intergovernmental system include the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, a private-public partnership designed to curb short-lived pollutants and their associated health risks, and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (Michael Bloomberg)...
Climate change is also increasingly addressed by a host of other international organizations whose mandates have evolved to include this challenge. Within the UN system alone, some twenty agencies work on this issue through their own specific lens, including the United Nations Environment Program, the Global Environment Facility, and the United Nations Development Program. Additionally, the World Bank has incorporated financing for mitigation and adaptation projects into its activities: at present, 21 percent of the Bank’s funding is climate related, totaling $10.3 billion a year. And in October 2015, the Bank pledged to increase its climate financing to up to $29 billion annually by 2020.
https://www.cfr.org/blog/stewart-patrick-combating-climate-change-beyond-paris
and that’s not all of the entities listed in the article.
Hey, even our states are on board these programs.
The federal government shot it down, but California is on board. I’m sure there are many other states who are, and I’m not just talking about Democrat ones.
We have squishy folks on our side too.
Foreign Relations Law: An Overview. ... The states are not sovereign “states” under international law, since the Constitution does not vest them with a capacity to conduct foreign relations. They are specifically prohibited from entering into any treaty, alliance, or confederation (see Article 1, § 10).
Thank you. I appreciate the mention.
I really do need to study up more on the U. S. Constitution.
FEBRUARY 2020 : () ———BUSTED: Mike Pompeo Says He Has List of American Governors Named as ‘Friendly’ by Communist China (FLASHBACK 2/9/2020), pjmedia.com ^ | 2/9/2020 | MEGAN FOX , Posted on 3/24/2020, 11:05:52 AM by bitt
In a shocking speech in front of the National Governors Association, Secretary Mike Pompeo revealed that he is in possession of a list of American governors who have been listed as “friendly” by Chinese Communist infiltrators.
Pompeo said he received an invitation from a former governor to attend a networking event that promised great “deal-making” opportunities with the Chinese government. This networking event was run by “The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship in Foreign Countries,” said Pompeo. But what the participants might not have known is that “the group is the public face of the Chinese Communist party’s official foreign influence agency, the United Front Work Department.” Pompeo knew of this connection from his time at the CIA.
He questioned the governors on how many of them knew that this group was a communist front group. “What if you made a new friend while you were at that event?” he asked. “What if your new friend offered to invest big money in your state, perhaps in your pension, an industry sensitive to our national security?”
And then he dropped a huge bomb on the crowd. “These aren’t hypotheticals,” he continued. “Last year a Chinese government-backed think tank in Beijing produced a report that assessed all fifty of America’s governors on their attitudes toward China. They labeled each of you friendly, hardline, or ambiguous.” Pompeo continued, “I’ll let you decide where you think you belong, someone in China already has. Many of you, indeed, in that report, are referenced by name.”
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
He’s a dictator...he’s not a dictator... He’s a dictator...he’s not a dictator ... He’s a dictator...he’s not a dictator. Sheesh, Libs, make up your minds.
That was like reading 400 stupid liberal t-shirts pasted together to form an article.
So the Democrats are in to states rights again?
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