Documents reveal 'shadow government'

About 1,000 documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America show the White House is engaging in collaborative relations with Mexico and Canada outside the U.S. Constitution, says WND columnist and author Jerome Corsi.

"The documents give clear evidence that the Bush administration has created a 'shadow government,'" Corsi said.

The documents can be viewed here, on a special website set up by the Minuteman Project.

Bureaucrats from agencies throughout the Bush administration are meeting regularly with their counterpart bureaucrats in the Canadian and Mexican governments to engage in a broad rewriting of U.S. administrative law and regulations into a new trilateral North American configuration, Corsi contends.

"We have hundreds of pages of e-mails from U.S. executive branch administrators who are copying the e-mail to somewhere between 25 to 100 people, a third of whom are in the U.S. bureaucracy, a third of whom are in the Mexican bureaucracy and a third of whom are in the Canadian bureaucracy," said Corsi.

"They are sharing their laws and regulations so we can 'harmonize' and 'integrate' our laws into a North American structure, not a USA structure."

"This is totally outside the U.S. Constitution, virtually an executive branch coup d'etat," he said. "SPP is creating new trilateral memoranda of understanding and mutual agreements which should be submitted to Senate for two-thirds votes as international treaties."

"We received very few actual agreements, though many are referenced," he said. "Many of the work plans described lack the work products which the groups say they produced."

Are there no forms of coordination between sovereign states that you can imagine?

No need for us to imagine anything. We have TREATIES.

T - R - E - A -T - I - E - S. The plural of TREATY.

That's what the White House is supposed to limit itself to.

As one example of the Treaty processs, in the legitimate security area...we formed NORAD, which worked as a facilitating structure with our own Strategic Air Command.

But that NEVER did away with the "differences" between commands, U.S. and Canadian, it just made arrangements so that coordination could happen, we could station radars, and they would have about 40 of their people at Cheyenne Mountain. It never involved changing our, or their laws so that the borders would be disrespected.

We also do SOME OTHER things in a variety of cross border issues...on a reasonable BILATERAL BASIS. But again nothing intended to essentially erase the border.

I note you can't seem to get your head around the idea of BILATERAL versus TRILATERAL. Bilateral forces input from our side necessarily. And they go before Congress. Which can veto. [I.e., at the dispositive level...with regard to foreign agreements...i.e., treaties, the LEGISLATIVE BRANCH via the SENATE wields ultimate authority...not the Executive]. Think about that.

This Administration (and the one before it) appears to harbor the delusion that they have a "get out from under Congress Free Pass" when they happen to be doing things at an even more removed level.

Hence, the exercises in equivocation by the CFR crowd on the SPP is a very practial illustration, but virtually self-evident, how global government can undermine our republican principles of Constitutional self-rule, and limited government.

Man, you really took a header with this one:

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Obviously. And you throw out red herring after red herring, trying to be deliberately obtuse.

The documents in question seem to be commerce agreements not treaties.

A distinction without a difference. Establish that there is anything in the U.S. Constitution authorizing "agreements" instead of "treaties." You won't find it.

Agreements between nations...of commercial orientation or not... are supposed to BE treaties... Furthermore, even if they were not, those "commerce agreements" do not in any sense evade Congressional supremacy here. And Congress has no basis to duck its responsibility here:

Section 8.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
....
To regulate commerce with foreign nations,

This is not the prerogative of the Executive Branch. It's the Legislative. Period.

Besides as I said before, with the requirement for treaties to be ratified by the consent...a two-thirds Senate vote is required. And clearly these, and anything to do with Security is a treaty... are treaties...note how the FIRST word in the SPP is "Security" not only "Prosperity" in this "Partnership."

There is no constitutional limit on the regulation of commerce that I am aware of.

First, you seem to be generally ignorant of a vast range of Constitutional protections that impinge on and can constrain that regulatory power. And then you in particular need to BECOME AWARE OF U.S. CONSTITUTION, ARTICLE I, Section 8, Clause 2. As noted above.

There is your "constitutional limit" right there. Wake up and smell the coffee.

The constitution was, in fact, drawn up to aid in the regulation of commerce between the states (among other things).

Not by the whim of the Executive Branch however...which is the main point that is at issue...but the one you conspicuously keep running away from, as you throw out still more red herrings.

What does that have to do with NORAD?

You asked for an example. You got one. Now you don't like it. As Mark Steyn would say of your digression, what does that have to do with the Price of Cheese? What are you smoking? At any rate, the example is more than apt, as we in this thread are in general, specifically talking about SECURITY HERE! You are the one rather suddenly trying to avoid those security discussions...and dodge and weave into trade. Shame on you. Even there, however, as definitively shown above...you are simply wrong about the authority issue.

Are you implying that the federal government has no constitutional right to enter into trade agreements with other nations?

How ridiculous. Where did I imply that? However, it is very clear, to reiterate,...the Executive Branch doesn't have any authority to do anything along these lines that isn't consented to or approved by 2/3rds of the Senate. Time for the Executive Branch muckety-mucks to put up or shut up. Show me where, as it hides what it is really doing by expressly refusing to supply the FOIA requests with the "real-McCoys"...that it hasn't gone rogue here.

You took a real long trip to simply say, it doesn't if it's done by the legislative, but it does if it's done by the executive. Correct?

Hardly a long trip. But if you noticed, the whole article is about how the Executive Branch is abolut the issue of the Shadow Government. This is not a function of normal constitutional channels.

The legislative branch is the antithesis of any such creation...it derives all of its authority from elections. The Executive appears to be going beyond its charter.

And that's confirmed by the documents they did and didn't provide. The ones they didn't provide are not classified...

Yet.

Those withheld documents, since they are not classified...are clearly pivotal and foundational according to the specific references in the documents they did turn over....therefore cannot be legally withheld from the FOIA requests.

The conclusion is inescapable that they are stonewalling. Trying to stretch this out into 2009.

A huge game of "keep-away" like the Xlinton's used to play with investigators of their shenanigans.

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