[Carry_Okie]

Is there any reason that any honest person would regard a treaty which was signed by the President but not ratified by the Senate as being any more meaningful than a treaty which was signed by the Secretary of State, or for that matter by Joe the Plumber?

Legally, no, the United States never ratified the Vienna Convention. Yet in holding that view, you will have to undo almost 35 years of precedent.

Anyone who is going to take action on the basis of a treaty which has allegedly been agreed to by any nation should first check whether the alleged agreement is legitimate under the laws of that nation.

Most nations are signatories and have ratified the Vienna Convention. It is therefore the law of their nations. Legally not ours, but by custom it has been done that way.

If some people fail to do so and are subsequently harmed by the country's subsequent refusal to honor the "treaty", the harm they suffers is entirely their own fault; they may seek redress against any individuals who misrepresented the treaty as being a legitimate agreement, but are not due any remedy by the country that never agreed to it.

Look, I'm no fan of this situation any more than you are. It is, however, a reality of the lawless government we face. We have done it in order to get other nations to sign such agreements. It is my responsibility to point out what the situation is, regardless of the fact that most FReepers' opinions hold that a signature is meaningless. Legally, they are correct. In terms of what will happen, it is not.

[supercat]

It is, however, a reality of the lawless government we face.

I think it is important to recognize the distinction between

1. government actions which are lawful,
2. government actions which aren't really lawful but represent the least-unlawful way of trying to unwind a mess caused by previous lawless action, and
3. government actions which are just plain lawless.

Many of the problems we face are a result of failures to recognize the above-mentioned distinctions; I don't see any way by which the mess will be resolved without first recognizing the aforementioned distinctions.

Fundamentally, the Constitution is an instruction manual for the citizenry, telling them how to distinguish between lawful actions which they should abide and lawless actions which they should resist. What the government can get away with is ultimately going to be determined by what the citizenry will tolerate. While it is possible that unratified treaties might result in outside political pressures being brought on the government which are sufficient to justify actions of the second category above in response, there is a huge difference between actions in that category and those in the first. Among other things, someone who is deciding among multiple alternative lawful courses of action should be presumed to be acting legitimately if he chooses a lawful course of action, even if some other lawful course of action might have been in some way "better". By contrast, someone who selects an unlwaful course of action has an obligation to show that every possible alternative would have been just as unlawful, if not more so. Actions may be unlawful but legitimate, but unlawful actions should not be given any presumption of legitimacy.