United Nations Plans for America's Future

Let me submit an extensive quote here in response to your question, Cal. A brief history of how treaties morphed into something else may shed some light on why so many doors to our house are open and why so many strangers are traipsing through our living room, looting our pantry, moving our furniture around and kicking our dog in the process:

Quoting Dr. James L. Hirsen, "The Coming Collision -- Global Law vs U.S. Liberties," (Chapter 11):

(footnote references omitted)

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Trading Away the Constitution"

"The Constitution requires that treaties must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the Senate in order to be enforceable as American Law. In recent years, this constitutional provision has been repeatedly ignored. The evasion of proper procedural requirements has had enormous consequences on the functioning of our government and serious effects on the discourse with the American people.

The saga of manipulating events and averting the Constitution involves sophisticated public relations campaigns, and oftentimes outright duplicity, revealing the ugly underbelly of politics. If we examine the many cumulative compromises that have been made over time, we could easily find ourselves paraphrasing the popular song, "How'd we ever get this way?"

The Questionable Passage of NAFTA

Abbreviated references such as GATT, NAFTA, and WTO have become familiar to most Americans. The news media provide reports about free trade when there is a debate among politicians, but the details presented are usually scant. The public has not been given the complete and proper picture when it comes to these international agreements.

On 20 November, 1993 the Senate voted on a treaty call the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Senate approved it by a vote of sixty-one to thirty-eight, but a perplexing question lingers to this day. Since NAFTA was passed with less than two-thirds of the Senate present, how could it possibly be valid under the Constitution? After a long and heated discussion of pertinent issues, why was there no mention of this constitutional concern?

Considering the fact that thirty-eight senators voted against NAFTA, and numerous high profile leaders sought the demise of the treaty, it would seem as if any and all arguments would have been used in an attempt to defeat the measure. Evidently, the political and legal elite accepted this new kind of approval procedure as unassailable. What is unfortunate for the American people is that this procedure cannot be reconciled with the provisions of the constitution.

Antics with Legal Semantics

The question of whether a world trade agreement can be passed with less that a two-thirds majority so plagued the community of scholars that, in 1005, a book-length article about NAFTA, written by Burce Ackerman, Professor of Law at Yale, and David Golove, Professor Law at the University of Arizona, appeared in the prestigious Harvard Law Review. The article was entitled "Is NAFTA Constitutional?" After one hundred twnety-four pages of discussion, the two professors came to the conclusion that NAFTA was valid, but it appeared as though they were arguing with the very essence of the Constitution and the real intent of the framers.

When the framers held the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they intentionally excluded the House of Representatives from being involved with treaty making. After debating the matter, they felt that foreign relations needed a discreet quality, such as that of the smaller senatorial body. At that time, the Senate consisted of only twenty-six senators from thirteen colonies. The framers did not feel they had to define the word 'treaty." In their world, it was a generic word that referred to any form of international agreement between nations. For 150 years after the country was established, a binding obligation between nations could never even have been considered enforceable without the required two-thirds vote of the Senate.

In 1945 a constitutional amendment was drafted to modify the approval process required for a treaty to be fully enforceable law if approved by majorities in both Houses rather than by the traditional two-thirds vote of the Senate. However, the movement to promote the establishment of this new amendment became unnecessary, primarily because of a novel manipulation of legal semantics. Through undue expansion of a simple term called "Executive agreement," a new approval procedure was utilized, despite the fact that it did not appear anywhere in the Constitution.

Foundations of Treaty Making

The framers of the Constitution debated the treaty making power vigorously. Both Madison and Hamilton believed that treaty making was a legislative function rather than an executive role. Hamilton noted that the King of England could make treaties by himself, and he certainly did not want the president to be compared with the British sovereign from whom this young country had just broken away. "In this respect, therefore, there is no comparison between the intended power of the President and actual power of the British sovereign. Hamilton's language indicates that he regarded the two-thirds approval requirement of the Senate to be mandatory for every possible international agreement.

One of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman, made a statement about the treaty power in relation to international agreements. He said that the Senate and president "ought to act jointly in every transaction with respect to the business of negotiation with foreign powers. Hamilton also believed that the treaty clause was one of the "best digested and unexceptionable parts of the plan." He thought that it was utterly unsafe and improper to entrust that power to an elective magistrate of four years duration.

Without a doubt, the writers of the Constitution would have been shocked to find out that trade agreements such as NAFTA, GATT, and WTO would be characterized as anything but treaties. In 1796 there was great debate over the Jay treaty with England. The House demanded access from President George Washington to all official papers connected with the negotiation of this treaty. When Washington refused to give these official papers to the House of Representatives, he state, "The power of making treaties is exclusively vested in the President, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate."

The approval process for treaties is described in the Constitution by the phrase that Washington used, "the Advice and Consent of the Senate." By employing these words, Washington confirmed his belief and support for the constitutional provision that requires a two-thirds vote by the Senate before a treaty is valid. The feud about treaty power continued over time, the description embodied in the Constitution was honored for the next 150 years.

Presidential power encompasses some limited international agreements. For example, the president has the power to negotiate a cease-fire or grant a pardon. However, one can search the Constitution from the beginning to end and not find any mention of the term executive agreement.

Nowhere in the Constitution is independent power granted to the president to make international agreements. [Emphasis mine.]

In cases where there is time for the Senate to act and where an agreement has importance in foreign relations, it is clear that the constitutional requirement of two-thirds approval of the Senate must be followed.

The Treaty Power and the New Deal

The 1930's brought about President Roosevelt's New Deal. Because of the Great Depression, economic policy was paramount. Two agreements involving specific commodities were inaugurated. One was the Silver Agreement of 1933 and the other was the Wheat Agreement of 1933. Both of these agreements had international implications. Yet President Roosevelt did not submit either agreement to the Senate. Instead, he declared these international initiatives to be executive agreements.

He simply placed them into law via a proclamation, believing that a previous act of Congress, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, gave him the power to do so. No opposing argument was mounted, and, after all, these actions were viewed as emergency measures in desperate times.

In 1934 President Roosevelt began to pursue broader international trade initiatives. One such initiative was called the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934. Roosevelt felt that the existing procedure for approving treaties was too slow to meet the economic challenges of his time. He sought his own version of what today we call fast track, an authorization by Congress to enter into a legally binding international trade agreement.

. Congress gave Roosevelt this ability, with overwhelming majorities in both Houses. Any criticism invoking the Constitution was easily suppressed due to the exigent circumstances of post-depression times. Thus, a constitutional aberration was allowed to take place. The president had always had the power, in very limited categories, to bind our nation. These specific instances had to do with military matters and settlement of claims. However, in the era of the New Deal, presidential authority was stretched out of proportion, permitting the president to enter into binding international agreements with a prior authorization of Congress.

It takes some historical recall and empathy to understand the mood of the nation and the collective mindset of the American people during these intensely turbulent times. In 1936 the Senate failed to approve the Treaty of Versailles and the public began to question the need for a two-thirds approval by the Senate. In October, 1943 it was such a major issue that a Gallup poll was taken to gauge public opinion as to whether or not the two-thirds majority of the Senate needed for approving treaties should be retained.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed thought that a simple majority in both Houses should be the new rule. By May 1944 the percentage of people favoring a change to a a majority vote in both Houses had risen to sixty percent.

Because of the public sentiment, a constitutional amendment was finally proposed and formally approved by th ehouse of Representatives to change the Constitution to eliminate the two-thirds requirement the Senate. By 1945 Congress was not dealing with whether the Senate would lose it's two-thirds approval power, but was pondering how it could be changed. A number of proposed constitutional amendments were being circulated through the House of Representatives. Simultaneously, the United Nations Charter, the founding document of the United Nations, was submitted to the Senate as a treaty.

The Senate approved it, partially believing that they were preserving their treaty making power for the future.

The difficulty of restoring the damaged economies of the affected nations was on the minds of world leaders after the devastation of World War II. As a result of the Breton Wood Conference in 1944, three organizations were established: the International Trade Organization (ITO), the INternational Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

Because the Senate refused to ratify the ITO, it emerged in 1947 as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Since these important organizations were established in the conference , and have been influential over the world economy ever since, they were referred to as the Bretton Woods Regime.

This establishment of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund created a whole new international economic order. Rather than confronting these major issues head on, the weak-spirited Senate of 1945 approved both broad, sweeping international agreements. A trickle of executive agreements turned into a waterfall with Roosevelt pushing through one international agreement after another.

The proliferation of treaties led to the campaign to amend the Constitution by Senator Bricker, [as set forth in Chapter 6]. Early versions of the Bricker amendment contained a provision that specified executive agreements could not be made in lieu of treaties. But by this time, legal scholars fully embraced the loophole of the using a two-House approval for treaties, as long as they were labeled executive agreements. [Emphasis mine.]

Professor Louis Henkin of Columbia University explained his view of the bypass of the Constitution when he said:

"Whatever theoretical merits, it is now widely accepted that the Congressional-executive agreement is a complete alternative to a treaty; the President can seek approval of any agreement by joint resolution of both Houses of Congress instead of two-thirds of the Senate only. Like a treaty, such an agreement is the law of the land superseding inconsistent state laws as well as inconsistent provisions in earlier treaties, other international agreements, or acts of Congress."

By making it easier for a treaty to become the supreme law of the land, a greater opportunity to erode state sovereignty and individual liberties exists, thereby empowering government to more readily implement international bureaucracy."

End of quoted section of Chapter 11.
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There you have it, folks. The explanation of how the government pulled the plug on our liberties and sovereignty and allowed treaty laws to supersede the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Everything that is happening in our country via UN/NGO intervention today can be attributed to the failure of the American people to stop the Senate in its tracks when it abdicated it's reponsiblity to deal with treaties/international agreements in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Constitution.

Even so, there is still much debate on whether treaty laws really do supersede the Bill of Rights/Constitution as the Supreme Law of the land, but that's another topic.

(Apologies for typos, etc. I spelt this by hand. :P)

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