As Americans learn the dangerous details of President Obama’s deal with Iran, Republican leaders should admit their mistake in passing Senator Bob Corker’s (R-TN) bill that reversed the process for treaty ratification. Instead of a treaty requiring approval from two-thirds of the Senate, the Corker bill allows the Iran deal to be disapproved by a simple majority in both houses-subject to a certain presidential veto, which requires two-thirds of both houses to override.
Under the Corker procedure, Obama can make a nuclear arms treaty involving Iran with the concurrence of just one-third of each house of Congress, instead of two-thirds of Senators as the Constitution specifies. As Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said when he voted against the Corker bill, “A nuclear-arms agreement with any adversary-especially the terror-sponsoring, Islamist Iranian regime-should be submitted as a treaty and obtain a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate as required by the Constitution.”
To quote Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate line, “there you go again.” Obama has littered the floor with torn shreds of the U.S. Constitution in so many areas, but Republican leaders keep letting him get by with it.
The power to make treaties is one of the most important powers of a sovereign government, and the U.S. Constitution is very specific about who can exercise that power. As clearly set forth in Article 2, Section 2, treaties may be made by the President only with the advice and consent of the Senate, “provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
Obama thinks he can exercise this power unilaterally, and the Council on Foreign Relations has been on record for years as saying that the treaty clause is the part of our Constitution they would most like to change. Let’s recall some of the mischievous treaties that the American people fortunately rejected because the globalists failed to get two-thirds of Senators to sign on.
The Convention (Treaty) on the Law of the Sea would have given up our control of the world’s oceans covering seven-tenths of the earth’s surface and transfer the ocean floor with all its mineral riches to the International Seabed Authority (ISA) headquartered on the Caribbean island of Jamaica.
The Convention (Treaty) on the Rights of the Child, which was championed by Hillary Clinton when she lived in the White House as her husband’s “presidential partner,” would have given children the right to hire lawyers to challenge parental authority on such matters as which church to attend and which TV shows may be watched.
The treaty about women, which the feminists call CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), would have given a foreign tribunal the authority to do the damage that Americans rejected when we refused to ratify the so-called Equal Rights Amendment. CEDAW was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980, but Senator Jesse Helms kept it from being ratified for the next two decades.
The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was rejected by the Senate in December 2012, but the Obama administration has promised to try, try again. The Arms Trade Treaty, a global gun grab imposing worldwide gun control, was approved by the UN with the support of Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, but Obama hasn’t yet dared submit it to the Senate.
We can thank our Founding Fathers for setting a high bar for ratification by the U.S. Senate, so that all those five dangerous treaties were rejected. All would have taken powers away from “we the people” and given pieces of U.S. sovereignty to foreign (and probably anti-American) busybodies.
In addition to Obama’s Iran deal disobeying the rules in the U.S. Constitution about treaty ratification, and in addition to the dangerous and unacceptable risk that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon, the deal gives Iran plenty of money to challenge the United States in missiles and space weapons. Iran has already launched four satellites into space capable of carrying a nuclear weapon.
Ambassador Henry F. Cooper, who was in charge of missile defense and space arms control in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, has warned that Iran’s satellites were launched over the South Pole, which means they approach the United States from the undefended direction of our south. Cooper warns that a nuclear explosion in space could produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which could cause the North American electric-power grid, which sustains human life as we know it, to shut down for an indefinite period of time.
The Corker bill, which essentially rewrote our Constitution’s treaty clause, puts America in a more dangerous position than ever before. It’s clear that we should never let Obama loose on the world stage because he betrays American security.
