Alexander Hamilton, Modern America’s Founding Father

We New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a century earlier Gotham took center stage as the nation’s first capital. For the house belonged to Alexander Hamilton—not only one of the greatest Founding Fathers but the one who stamped the infant republic forever with the unique spirit of New York City.

The other Founders were Americans of a century’s standing, who fought the Revolution to defend liberties their families had claimed for generations. Washington and Jefferson, landed grandees, descended from seventeenth-century Virginians; Harvard-educated John Adams’s forebears settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1638. Such men were rooted Americans, living on land inherited from their fathers. Hamilton, by contrast, was a penniless immigrant from the West Indies; like so many New Yorkers, he had come here from elsewhere, seeking his fortune.

And he wasn’t just penniless. “My birth,” as he delicately put it, “is the subject of the most humiliating criticism”—for he was, in John Adams’s acidulous taunt, “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.” Nevertheless, as a prime exemplar of that American opportunity and enterprise he so fervently promoted, he rose to be the country’s second most powerful man. As Ron Chernow puts it in his indispensable biography, he served in effect as George Washington’s prime minister and head of government, directing his administration’s policy and molding the enduring institutions...

I think Carry_okie rather than say "poison pill," he meant to "Trojan Horse" as he did in that link to which he sent you. Let me try and shorten the answer you'll get from the link as I think C_O has an important point. 1. Our Constitution allows for treaties to override all other laws, the constitution included. No sh!t.

any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding

2. Our Constitution grants the president the power to treaty provided he gets 2/3 agreement from "the senators present." No sh!t again.

present

See? An unscrupulous president and his star chamber ("senate committee" of his careful caling together at some prearranged time when others are gone) may alone ratify treaties that override Constitutional limits on presidential, legislative, and judicial power where the treaty so ratified requires those limits be ignored.

Now isn't that one helluva Trojan Horse. You may think this is too fantastic to have been in our Constitution all this time not to have made waves, but C_O makes the case that it has been misused already (but carefully when our politicians were not as shameless as they are today) in that much longer link that I just whittled down for you.

IN SHORT: A president and a group of senatorial cronies who want power to override the constitution merely have to ratify a treaty drawn up by fellow travelers at the UN, and they have no choice but to comply with the treaty (they're really and truly sorry, but that's the way it is).

You've misinterpreted one aspect of the case.

any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

That clause refers to treaties superseding State Constitutions; the Constitution for the United States is in fact mute on whether treaty power can exert supremacy over the Constitution. One could rightly make the case that unconstitutional treaties are void because the government did not possess the legal power to negotiate particular terms and it has been in fact so stated in the Supreme Court, but in addition to the fact that said principle has never specifically voided a treaty despite hordes of legitimate opportunities, they have a cute little reality to deal with that wishful premise.

It won't matter if a treaty supersedes the Constitutional or not in the pure sense, if it is assigned as authority in a court and if the administrative branch can get away with enforcing the judgment, then it is a de facto supremacy over the Constitution, hierarchies of principle notwithstanding.

Misinterpreted? Maybe the way the contrary argument COULD be presented were the executive branch ever to argue on behalf of its obligation to defend the Constitution rather than fall prey to its desires for more power — or even simply to leave such options and avenues available.

My interpretation of the factual (and current) situation? I thought I got your message loud and clear and passed it on relatively intact. Certainly there are no lack of devils abounding to aid an ambitious president. You have identified one whose machinations has been laying about for more than two hundred years awaiting for a brigand.

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