Posted on 07/07/2009 5:47:56 AM PDT by bestintxas
I think BO is highly dangerous to the freedom enshrined in our Constitution.
I do have to think, though, that the CONGRESS, even the LIBERAL CONGRESS will be very hesitant to cede their powers to the TOTUS.
A liberal Congress wanting to keep its powers may be what keeps us from complete dictatorship. On the other hand, Bambi has been known to “make alliances” that give him power and make his allies THINK they’re getting something in return.
I don’t think the Dems thought about Obama taking power from them; but that’s what dictators do. They have no friends. They should look hard at Pelosi, Reid, Waxman, Frank, Dodd, Murtha; etc to see how they are contriburing to their demise.
BO is a threat to our security.
We’d have been better off with Shrillary.
Let’s face it, when it’s “our” side that does it, we grin and bear it. Which means at anyone time, half the populace is grinning and bearing it. Maybe one party tacks a little differently than the other, but the friggin’ boat’s still going in the same direction.
Obama knows that he won’t get impeached, he could put the document through a shredder literally and the Democrats will not vote for impeachment. He’s safe until 2010 no matter what he does and he knows it.
Way to go america.
The Bricker Amendment
By Justin Raimondo
The problem of international treaties superseding the U.S. Constitution and undermining the foundations of our Republic is not a new one. The conservative movement of the early 1950’s, which looked on the United Nations with extreme suspicion, was particularly sensitive to this threat — and they hit upon a solution: the Bricker Amendment.
Introduced into the Senate in February, 1952, as Senate Joint Resolution 130, the “Bricker Amendment” to the Constitution read as follows:
* Section 1. A provision of a treaty which conflicts with this Constitution shall not be of any force or effect.
* Section 2. A treaty shall become effective as internal law in the United States only through legislation which would be valid in the absence of treaty.
* Section 3. Congress shall have power to regulate all executive and other agreements with any foreign power or international organization. All such agreements shall be subject to the limitations imposed on treaties by this article.
* Section 4. The congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Mobilizing to support Bricker, conservatives built a grand coalition which included all the major veterans groups, the Kiwanis Clubs, the American Association of Small Business, many women’s groups, as well as the conservative activist organizations of the time, such as the Freedom Clubs and the Committee for Constitutional Government. The conservative press joined in the campaign; writing in Human Events, Frank Chodorov said that
The proposed amendment arises from a rather odd situation. A nation is threatened by invasion, not by a foreign army, but by its own legal entanglements. Not soldiers, but theoreticians and visionaries attack its independence and aim to bring its people under the rule of an agglomeration of foreign governments. This is something new in history. There have been occasions when a weak nation sought security by placing itself under the yoke of a strong one. But, here we have the richest nation in the world, and apparently the strongest, flirting with the liquidation of its independence. Nothing like that has ever happened before.
The breach in our defenses, said Chodorov, is in Article VI of the Constitution, which provides that “... All Treaties ...shall be the supreme Law of the Land... any Thing in the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.” At the time of the Founders, the division between foreign and domestic policy was clear enough; there was never any intention, as Jefferson wrote, to enable the President and the Senate to “do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way.”
But as the concept of limited government was eroded — and under pressure from the endless stream of pacts, covenants, and executive agreements issuing forth from the United Nations and its American enthusiasts — the chink in our constitutional armor widened. Just as the growth of administrative law had threatened to overthrow the old Republic during the darkest days of the New Deal, so under Truman and Eisenhower the burgeoning body of treaty law threatened to overthrow U.S. sovereignty. Executive agreements had created administrative law of a new type; treaties which sought to regulate domestic economic and social behavior to a degree never achieved by the Brain Trusters. If the New Deal had failed to completely socialize America, to conservatives it often seemed as if the United Nations seemed determined to finish the job. According to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, human beings were endowed with all sorts of “rights,” including the right to a job and the right to “security.” There were, however, certain significant omissions, chief among them the right to own and maintain private property. Another equally glaring omission was the unqualified right to a free press, the regulation of which is left up to member nations. When three Supreme Court justices, including the Chief Justice, cited the UN Charter and the NATO treaty in support of their argument that Truman had the right to seize the steel mills, conservatives went into action — and the fight for the Bricker Amendment began in earnest.
The Eisenhower Administration, and particularly the U.S. State Department, went all out to defeat the Amendment. Leading the opposition was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. This was the same John Foster Dulles who had said, two years previous, that “The treaty power is an extraordinary power, liable to abuse,” and warned that “Treaties can take powers away from the Congress and give them to the President. They can take powers from the states and give them to the federal government or to some international body and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their Constitutional Bill of Rights.” Hammered with this quote by Clarence Manion, Dean of Law at Notre Dame University, and a leading proponent of the Bricker Amendment, Dulles could only take refuge in the argument that this President would never compromise U.S. sovereignty.
Although the Bricker Amendment started out with fifty-six co- sponsors, it eventually went down to defeat in the U.S. Senate, 42-50, with 4 not voting. (A watered-down version, the “George proposal,” lost by a single vote.) The defection of Senators William Knowland and Alexander Wiley from conservative Republican ranks on this occasion was particularly significant, and marked the beginning not only of Wiley’s chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but also the decline of the movement to put and keep America first.
As Frank E. Holman, president of the American Bar Association, and the sparkplug of the Bricker Amendment movement, wrote:
In the destiny of human affairs a great issue like a righteous cause does not die. It lives on and arises again and again until rightly won. However long the fight for an adequate Constitutional Amendment on treaties and other international agreements, it will and must be won. This will be the history of the Bricker Amendment as it has been the history of all other great issues and causes.
Holman’s comments were published in 1954 as Story of the Bricker Amendment, (The First Phase) — a title which one can only hope is prophetic.
Committee Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans home page
My side never does it, because I longer take sides, I am an Independent.
LLS
You may be interested in this. Obama appears to be thinking about by passing the Senate’s Constitutional duty of treaty ratification...as I thought he might do.
The Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START I) between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) and the United States (U.S.) was signed in Moscow on July 31, 1991 at a summit meeting between Soviet and U.S. presidents, Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush, and entered into force on December 5, 1994. It was the first agreement of this kind between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. The purpose of the Treaty was to ensure parity between the two sides’ strategic nuclear forces at levels 30% down on initially deployed forces.
The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty - known as the SORT or Moscow Treaty - was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President George W. Bush in Moscow on May 24, 2003. It specifies the reduction of operationally-deployed strategic nuclear warheads to a range of 2,200-1,700 per side by 2012. The Treaty was approved by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 5, and by the full Senate on March 6 by a vote of 95 to 0. Two proposed amendments to the adoption resolution were defeated: the first, requiring Senate approval of any US decision to withdraw from the treaty, by 50 votes to 44; the second, requiring annual reports to the Senate on treaty compliance, by 50 votes to 45.
Now’s a good time to return to making it mandatory.
Has there been a congress in the last 80 years that has viewed the constitution as anything other than optional?
Are any in congress smart enough to notice that they have been made irrelevant. Hillary (the smartest woman in the world) seems not to have realized that she has been muzzled and sidelined. Then on the other hand Zero is the first President to think he requires a food taster.
The problem is the Main Stream Media.
They should be all over this, holding our officials to constitutional standards.
Instead the MSM is filled with leftists homosexuals and has too much middle eastern ownership.
We need to replace the main stream media and the liberal journalism departments in the colleges where it spawns.
I conclude that you could grab anyone off the streets and this individual would act no differently or better than what is in Congress now.
To impeach the 0ne, we must first impeach Congress. Not like that’s a bad thing.
“Constitution apparently declared optional by Obama administration(Grounds for impeachment brewing)”
Impeachment by who? The RAT majority in the house? Obama could run tanks over school-children and they wouldnt impeach him. And even if they did, who would remove him from office, the RAT supermajority in the Senate?
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