Here is a “third” TEA Party Platform:
* Close and seal the Southern US Border, all 2,000 + miles of it.
* Cancel NAFTA.
* Abolish all Federal, State and Local Welfare payments to non-citizens of the USA.
* Block all money transfers to Mexico, or other any Country South of our Southern Border.
* Have lunch.
* After lunch, pass and sign Federal Penalty law to anyone who hires an Illegal Alien Invader, with a fine of $1,000 per day per alien.
* String Concertina Wire Holding-Pen Stockades at 100 mile intervals for the newly captured gotta-ways.
* Be as hostile to Mexicans as the Mexicans have been to the US Marine held and tortured in Prison by the Mexican Guards for the last two months.
* Hire Greyhound Bus Company to transport Illegal Alien Invaders to Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Chain Link Desert Spa near Phoenix, Arizona.
* Have supper.
“* Cancel NAFTA.”
NAFTA and GATT ceded US serenity to a foreign court. I suspect we can’t cancel the treaties without being taken to a foreign court. Cancellation would be a violation of the treaty and our trading partners would then invoke the penalty clauses. This happened when Bush put a tariff on steel so he could get some votes in Pennsylvania. We were taken to court, lost, and our trading partners retaliated by putting tariffs on thousands of US goods, making them unsalable in their markets. It hurt so badly that Bush was forced to cancel the tariff on steel. (This is probably the enforcement mechanism on the UN Arms treaty that would lead to making all private gun sales in the US illegal.)
This is the danger of any treaty, but especially one that uses asymmetric enforcement. We can wiggle and weasel within the terms of the treaty, which is how we ended up with alcohol in gas. We were taken to court and accused of subsidizing farmers. We lost, as we do subsidize. But it was impossible to remove the subsidies so the lawyers went to work and found a national defense loophole, which is how putting alcohol in gas got linked to national defense. (Really, it is, linked I mean. In reality it is as related to national defense as we are related to rocks.)