Posted on 07/30/2006 2:51:32 PM PDT by yoe
Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to regulate private property. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to manage wildlife or prescribe land-use regulations within the various states.
By what authority, then, has the federal government constructed the expansive bureaucracy that now forces wolves, panthers and bears on states and communities that don't want them, or levied fines, and jailed people who dare dig a ditch or dump a load of sand on their own private property?
This federal power arises from the treaty clause (Article VI (2)) of the U.S. Constitution.
Alabama attorney Larry Becraft provides an excellent analysis of just how and when this treaty power was discovered. This power has been exploited dramatically in recent years, and is the basis for imposing a global environmental and social agenda on the United States.
Before the Ramsar Treaty, no American was jailed for dumping sand on his own private property. Ocie Mills and his son spent 21 months in a federal prison and a decade in litigation for dumping 19 loads of building sand on his own property after securing a county building permit and approval from the state department of environmental protection.
Before the CITES Treaty, no one would fault a person for shooting a charging bear. John Shuler was fined $7,000 and spent nine years in litigation because he shot a grizzly – charging toward him only 30-feet away from his front porch.
Environmental extremists, inside and outside the government, are using international treaties to expand the power of government far beyond the power granted originally by the Constitution.
The process has been refined to an art. Environmental organizations pour millions of dollars into the campaigns of elected officials. When elected, the officials repay the favor by appointing executives of the environmental organizations to powerful governmental positions. The Clinton/Gore administration appointed at least 27 of these extremists to powerful positions, including Bruce Babbitt from the League of Conservation Voters to head the Department of Interior, and George Frampton from the Wilderness Society to head the Fish and Wildlife Service.
More than 50 major U.S. environmental organizations, and six federal agencies (including the U.S. State Department), are members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, an international non-government organization that has drafted virtually all of the international environmental treaties for half a century. Delegations that represent the U.S. in treaty negotiations are headed by the U.S. State Department. When a treaty is adopted by the U.N. body, the federal agencies and the environmental organizations that helped draft the treaty then lobby Congress and their constituents to demand ratification.
The League of Conservation Voters supported the Clinton/Gore ticket in 1992. They got their reward. Now the LCW is supporting the Kerry/Edwards ticket. They expect, and will undoubtedly get their reward if the two Johns are elected.
When George Bush was elected in 2000, the international community was bitterly disappointed, and had cause to be. Bush immediately withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which Al Gore personally navigated through the contentious 1997 U.N. conference in Kyoto, Japan.
Bush immediately withdrew the U.S. signature from the International Criminal Court, which the Clinton administration signed just hours before the deadline. Bush also pulled the plug on a decade-long strategy to authorize U.N. global taxation when he forced a rewrite of the document produced by the U.N.'s High Level Panel on Financing Development in Monterrey, Mexico.
The power of U.N. treaties over domestic policy is not limited to environmental regulations. Increasingly, the U.N. is developing treaties to govern the Internet, the oceans, space, domestic taxation, trade and virtually every other area of human activity.
The Bush administration was right in withdrawing from U.N. activity, but it is a meager first step in a process of withdrawal that must be accelerated. Sadly, many internationalist environmental extremists remain embedded in the Bush administration and in Congress. The recent revival of the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty, pushed by John Turner in the State Department, and Sen. Richard Lugar, is evidence that a more thorough cleansing of government is needed.
The elections in November are a referendum on whether to continue to disrupt the U.N. process of dominating domestic public policy, or whether we will return to the Clinton/Gore days of advancing the internationalist/environmental agenda through U.N. treaties. John Kerry has made clear his intention to restore international favor by subjecting the United States to the will of the international community.
Henry Lamb is the executive vice president of the Environmental Conservation Organization and chairman of Sovereignty International.
Wayne Hage went to his deathbed with that knowledge. His mastery of that subject is one reason why he won on his regulatory takings case in the US Court of Claims.
Go ahead, find me a substantial American-owned hard rock mining company operating in the American West. Just keep yucking it up while China drills of our coast while American companies can't. That deal isn't on paper either. Just keep laughing while Vivendi buys up water companies in California, while having curiously little difficulty getting permits.
Meanwhile, try, just for once, defending your bald faced and ignorant assertion with an example.
Yes, I'm thanking Ross. Now I didn't support Ross in his run in 1992 or 1996, and yes, I think we got Clinton because of him.
But it was Ross Perot who led the opposition to NAFTA, along with Pat Buchanan. Famously Gore "defeated" (in the lying-eyes of the legacy media) Ross Perot who argued the "Hell No" position on NAFTA.
It is my considered opinion that had not Perot and Buchanan mounted as loud an opposition as they did we would have NAFTA as a treaty. Because of the opposition they focused we ended up with only an "agreement". That is just more bad laws that are *not* the equal or slightly subordiate (depending on who's arguments on this thread you prefer) to the US Constitution, but rather just more bad crappy laws, like the other few thousand our brave citizen-legislatures have saddled us with in the last 50 years.
For that he deserves thanks.
In the Constitution, there isn't even the faintest hint of what the social-justice (sic) attorneys call 'environmental' and/or 'human rights' ''law''. Correct me if wrong, but such a body of ''law'' would seem to be quite thoroughly established these days, eh?
Wonder how this happened, do you?
While I have always considered the secession of the states that later formed the Confederacy to have been rank idiocy, for at least 10 or a dozen separate reasons, the apodeictic fact of the matter is that such secession is fully within the Constitutional powers of the several states,
as the document was/is written.
You shock me. Historically, one would tend to use the adverbial phrase ''almost invariably''.
All who are "politicians" aren't all elected to office. Sorry to seem so nit picking.
Which brings me back to my previous point above.
Ping
Ping.
This is an old story.
Yes, I think the nonwithstanding clause was written to reassure the rest of the world that the new, experimental government at Philadelphia could be relied on to keep its word.
The result is absurd, of course. A Constitution which is almost impossible to amend can be changed at will by the President and 2/3 of the Senate?
A treaty banning free speech is enforceable?
The Bricker Amendment debate covered a lot of this territory but couldn't be passed, even in the 1950s.
This will be an interesting ball to keep your eye on.
BTTT
For later.
Best to save "almost invariably" for individual Congress-critters. Otherwise you'd be using that all the time.
Not even, 2/3 of "Senators present." When the Convention on Nature Protection was ratified, the Congressional Record contains no recount of a vote, a committe vote, or even a quorum. It's scary.
If you haven't read Hamilton's papering over of this detail in Federalist 75 in that light, it's worth the revisit.
He took it with him? And now no one else can prove it? Interesting. Did the Feds kill him to keep their little secret?
Go ahead, find me a substantial American-owned hard rock mining company operating in the American West. Just keep yucking it up while China drills of our coast while American companies can't. That deal isn't on paper either. Just keep laughing while Vivendi buys up water companies in California, while having curiously little difficulty getting permits.
Interesting little factoids which have zero to do with US Treasury debt.
Meanwhile, try, just for once, defending your bald faced and ignorant assertion with an example.
My ignorant assertion? My assertion is that your assertion is wrong. Until you show something that proves water and mineral rights somehow collateralize our US Treasury debt, my assertion wins.
Don't be puzzled. In order to believe that treaties trump the Constitution, one must (almost) necessarily believe that the Constitution authorizes treaties to trump itself. Ponder that for a moment.
Now as I look back on their "Reform Party" effort, I see a third pathetic party in the form of Jesse Ventura. Jesse stirred up his fellow actor in the "Predator" movie (Arnold Schwartzenegger) who now has totally screwed up the CAGOP and is binding CA's future in a mammoth bondage scheme!
Now Jack... I find NOTHING conservative, or enlightened in the history, or behaviors of ANY of these egomaniacle clowns. And I certain put NO stock in ANY of their theories or actions!!! To me, you are idolizing the wrong dudes somehow!!!
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