The Many Assaults on U.S. Sovereignty — June 2002

We are also beginning to hear more frequently about “dual citizenship,” but that phrase is an oxymoron. One cannot truly be a citizen of two different countries because ultimately loyalty cannot be divided. If the two countries went to war against each other, the so-called dual citizens would have to pick sides. No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.

Dual citizenship is not the same as holding two active passports from different countries, because a passport alone does not prove citizenship.

The issue of dual citizenship arises because countries have different requirements for citizenship and it is possible to satisfy the requirements of two or more countries. U.S. citizenship is based on U.S. law, which is that one must be born in the United States or naturalized according to our naturalization law.

Thus, in order to become a U.S. citizen, immigrants are required by law to transfer their allegiance from their native country to the United States of America. You cannot be a dual citizen with the country you emigrated from. But our country is now confronted with the problem of immigrants who have been falsely led to believe that they are or can be dual citizens, and this dangerous notion is diluting our national identity and culture.

Mexico passed a law in 1998 that extends citizenship to Mexicans who are naturalized in other countries and to their children. This is an invitation to new U.S. citizens either to betray their oath of allegiance to the United States or to cross their fingers behind their backs when they take it.

Many statements by President Vicente Fox and other Mexican officials show that their plan is to export a segment of their population to the United States, let them become U.S. citizens, but retain them as Mexican citizens. Mexico wants these new American citizens to consider themselves “binationals,” and to vote in both the U.S. and Mexico, with Mexican politicians campaigning for their votes and allegiance.

Mexico is also trying to legitimize Mexican aliens illegally living in the United States by giving them special ID cards called “matricula consulare.” These Mexican ID cards are being used to pretend to validate their illegal residence, prevent deportation, and help them to get U.S. driver’s licenses, jobs, taxpayer benefits, and in-state university tuition.

U.S. officials from San Francisco to Anaheim, Albuquerque to Austin to Houston, have announced that they will accept these Mexican-issued ID cards. Some police, some banks, and some airlines have said they will accept them.

U.S. law allows U.S. citizenship to be removed if a person behaves like a citizen of another country or manifests an intent to give up U.S. citizenship as shown by statements or conduct. But a series of post-World War II U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decisions have made it difficult to revoke U.S. citizenship.

Current law specifies at least seven reasons for revoking U.S. citizenship, such as obtaining naturalization in a foreign state or taking an oath to a foreign state. Voting is not one of the listed reasons.

We are told that millions of U.S. residents now claim dual citizenship. Congress should put an end to this dangerous notion and tighten up the law on what constitutes evidence that a naturalized U.S. citizen intends to retain or to reinstate his loyalty to a foreign country. Congress should legislate that voting in a foreign country is evidence of intent to relinquish U.S. citizenship. Congress should also authorize our government to revoke citizenship based on the preponderance of evidence standard.

It is unacceptable for a naturalized American to retain or reinstate allegiance to any other country. We only welcome immigrants who want to be Americans.

The International Criminal Court 
The globalists are constantly devising plans to lock the United States into a world government that erases national borders and diminishes national sovereignty. War, “peacekeeping” escapades, and treaties are the means of incrementally achieving that goal.

That was the lesson of Bill Clinton’s 78 days of bombing of Yugoslavia — a sovereign state that had never attacked another country. NATO was used as the vehicle since the bombing would have violated the United Nations Charter, which recognizes the sovereignty of nation-states. “Human rights” provided the rhetoric to trump national sovereignty.

NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana boasted that the Yugoslav war moved us into “a system of international relations in which human rights . . . are much more important than sovereignty.” Czech leader Vaclav Havel called the Yugoslav war “an important precedent for the future” in which “state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve.”

The globalists want to induce America to join European political, military, economic, and governmental bureaucracies in which the United States has only one vote. They already have conned us into joining the World Trade Organization where we have only one vote while the European Union has 15 votes and thus can easily manipulate the WTO’s judicial system, which operates in secret.

Treaties play a major role in inducing the United States to submit to international regulations and monitoring. Every UN treaty would diminish U.S. sovereignty by interfering with self-government over some aspect of our lives, our business or our property.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), which ties countries into a global judicial system, is part and parcel of these persistent treaty plans to erase the borders of national sovereignty. Bill Clinton, who told the United Nations on September 22, 1997 that he wanted to put the United States into a “web of institutions and arrangements” for “the emerging international system,” supported this treaty enthusiastically during its five years of formation, and then signed it as one of his last official acts near midnight on New Year’s Eve, 2000.

Fortunately, the U.S. Senate never ratified it, and on May 6, 2002, President George W. Bush took the unprecedented step of causing our State Department to send a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan stating that “the United States does not intend to become a party to the treaty” and “has no legal obligations arising from its [Clinton’s] signature on December 31, 2000.” This is colloquially referred to as “unsigning” the treaty.

However, the treaty was ratified by 66 other nations, and so it goes into effect on July 1, 2002. The Court has started functioning in the Hague, and the pompous bureaucrats there claim the authority to detain and try U.S. citizens anyway — military personnel as well as current and future public officials — even though we didn’t ratify the treaty!

The ICC plans to prosecute individuals for war crimes, genocide and “crimes against humanity” whose definition is still evolving, using procedures that violate U.S. constitutional safeguards. The ICC is accountable to no one, not even to the United Nations where we have our Security Council veto.

The model for the ICC is not the International Court of Justice that has been functioning since World War II, which can try only countries, not individuals. The ICC plans to be a successor to the tribunals set up by the United Nations to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda in 1994 and the former Yugoslavia in 1990. Those two courts cost $100 million a year to operate, and there is no end in sight. In addition to the cost and the perpetuation of jobs for the bureaucracy, their procedures are political show trials conducted under rules that Americans accustomed to Bill of Rights protections should never condone.

Those who think that the ICC would limit itself to the really bad thugs of the world — the Pol Pots, the Foday Sankohs and the Idi Amins — have their heads in the sand. The expansive jurisdiction claimed by the ICC would put every U.S. serviceman and woman, and even U.S. travelers, especially if they are or have been public officials, at risk of being grabbed for trial by judges from Sierra Leone, Sudan, Iran, and other nations hostile to the rule of law.

The ICC would be an enticing venue for anti-American sentiment. Some are probably already licking their chops at the prospect of indicting Bill Clinton for his bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia, Henry Kissinger for his intervention in Chile, and U.S. service personnel for the “collateral damage” they inflict when they are fighting to save other nations from terrorists.

The globalists are trying to tell us that the ICC really “supports American values” and “mirrors the Constitution.” That’s a lot of poppycock. Here are some U.S. constitutional protections against unfair prosecutions that are violated by the ICC: (1) the right to trial by an impartial jury of one’s peers (the most important protection), (2) the right to trial in the same jurisdiction where the offense was committed, (3) the right to a speedy trial within months, not years, (4) the right to a unanimous verdict for serious crimes, (5) the right to confront witnesses (the ICC has key loopholes), (6) the obligation to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense (the ICC lets the prosecutor decide), and (7) no double jeopardy (the ICC is full of loopholes).

Senator Jesse Helms and Majority Whip Tom DeLay have tried valiantly to get Congress to pass the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act to protect our troops from the ICC. This bill would cut off U.S. military aid to any country that ratifies the ICC, prohibit U.S. forces from participating in UN peacekeeping operations unless expressly immunized from ICC jurisdiction, and authorize the President to take any means “necessary and appropriate” to free U.S. servicemembers from ICC captivity. Versions of this bill have passed both Houses of Congress and been endorsed by the Bush Administration, but it has not yet become law because of opposition by the Democrats.

United Nations Treaty on Women 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D-DE) and the Clinton holdovers in the State Department have been conspiring to resuscitate the long-moribund United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The State Department has placed it on a list of acceptable treaties.

CEDAW is not acceptable, and George W. Bush’s entire constituency is up in arms against it. It was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bill Clinton made an attempt to get it ratified in 1996, but no one rallied to support it except the Clintonista feminists.

The notion is downright ridiculous that American women (the most fortunate class of people who ever lived) should submit to a treaty that dictates uniform rules for 130 other nations (all of which treat women worse than the United States). But the whining feminists induce some men to do foolish things, and endorsing this terrible treaty is one of the most foolish.

Ratification of CEDAW would be craven kowtowing to the radical feminists, exceeded only by the treaty’s unlimited capacity for legal mischief. It would be a massive interference with U.S. laws as well as with our federal-state balance of powers.

Even Edmund S. Muskie, when he was Secretary of State, admitted that this treaty applies “to private organizations and areas of personal conduct not covered by U.S. law.” His memo said that the treaty completely fails to take into account “the division of authority between the state and federal governments in the United States.”

Article 1 purports to abolish discrimination against women “in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.” “Other fields”? Private relationships should be none of our government’s business, much less the business of the United Nations.

Article 2 reiterates that the treaty would “eliminate discrimination against women by any person, organization or enterprise,” including “customs and practices” as well as all “public institutions.” This would include mandating the longtime feminist goal of a gender-neutral military.

Article 3 would require us to pass new federal laws not only in political but also in “social, economic and cultural fields.” Article 5 would require us “to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to give assurances that we are following United Nations dictates about “family education.”

Article 10 would make it a federal responsibility to ensure “the elimination of any stereotyped concept of the roles of men and women at all levels and in all forms of education . . . by the revision of textbooks and . . . teaching methods.” The UN would be authorized to revise our textbooks to conform to feminist ideology and semantics!

Article 11 would chain us to the feminist goal that wages should be paid on subjective notions of “equal value” (i.e., the discredited notion of “comparable worth”) rather than on objective standards of equal work. It would also require another long-time feminist goal, a federal “network of child-care facilities.”

Article 16 would require us to allow women “to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children.” This is feminist jargon to lock the United States into a perpetual treaty obligation to allow abortions at any time for any reason. On the other hand, this language would not protect Chinese women victimized by their government’s policy of forced abortions because China takes the position that it is not “responsible” for a woman to bear more than one child.

Article 16 also levels a broadside attack on states’ rights. It would obligate the federal government to take over all family law, including marriage, divorce, child custody, and property.

To monitor U.S. “progress” (i.e., compliance) under this treaty, Article 17 sets up a committee of “23 experts.” No doubt that means “experts” in feminist ideology and tactics, such as Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer and Patricia Schroeder

CEDAW’s international “experts” have already issued negative reports about the practices of countries that were rash enough to ratify the treaty. They criticized Ireland for “promoting a stereotypical view of the role of women in the home and as mothers,” Belarus for “such symbols as a Mother’s Day,” Slovenia because “less than 30 percent of children under three years of age were in formal day care,” and recommended “the decrimininalization of prostitution in China.”

CEDAW would clearly diminish the rights and benefits American women now enjoy, as well as give extraordinary powers over U.S. laws to busybody global bureaucrats. We hope President Bush will “unsign” it just as he rejected the International Criminal Court Treaty.

UN Treaty on the Rights of the Child 
A United Nations conference to finalize an international agreement to improve the conditions of the world’s children was held at the United Nations in May 2002. The underlying goal was to position the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as the legal standard for children’s rights and to promote U.S. ratification of the treaty.

Fortunately, that goal was not achieved. The conference ended in disarray after 30 hours of negotiations that included bitter accusations and angry walkouts. Most of the contention concerned language over reproductive health care services, abstinence as the centerpiece of sex education, and whether marriage means the union of one man and one woman.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was signed in 1995 by Bill Clinton but wisely never ratified by our Senate. It’s been a pet project of the cult of people who believe that the “village” should raise children rather than their parents, including Hillary Clinton and her buddies in the Children’s Defense Fund.

If this treaty were proposed as federal legislation, it would be quickly rejected by Congress and the American people. That’s because it would give the federal government unacceptably broad new powers over children, families, and schools. If we wouldn’t give such powers to our own government, why in the world would we even talk about granting such powers to a panel of foreign bureaucrats, even if they call themselves “experts”? But the purpose of this treaty is to give the UN a role in the raising of children.

This treaty purports to give the child the right to express his own views “freely in all matters,” to receive information of all kinds through “media of the child’s choice,” to “freedom of religion,” to be protected from “interference with his or her privacy … or correspondence,” to have access to information from national and “international sources,” to use his “own language,” and to have the right to “rest and leisure.”

These are just a few of the dozens of new “rights of the child” scattered throughout the 54 Articles of the UN treaty, which is longer than the U.S. Constitution.

Do we really want to give every child the legal right to say anything he wants to his parents at the dinner table? To watch television (“access to the media”) instead of doing homework? To escape household chores because they interfere with his UN right to “rest and leisure”? To join a cult instead of attending his parents’ church? To refuse to speak English in our public schools?

Unlike our U.S. Constitution, which only mentions rights that can be enforced against the government, this UN treaty declares rights of the child against parents, the family, private institutions, and society as a whole. Since the treaty is a legal document which, if ratified, would become part of the “supreme law of the land,” we can expect liberal lawyers to bring test cases to persuade activist judges to push its reach as far as they can.

Current U.S. law prohibits our own federal government from prescribing any school curriculum, but this UN treaty on the Rights of the Child prescribes curricula with meddlesome specificity. It calls for teaching children respect for “the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations,” for “the national values of … civilizations different from his or her own,” for “tolerance” and “equality of the sexes,” and for “the natural environment.”

This UN treaty requires governments, to the “maximum extent of their available resources,” to assure the right of every child to an “adequate standard of living,” including “nutrition, clothing and housing.” Since these provisions cannot be implemented without money, will the courts require our government to impose new taxes to carry out these treaty obligations?

The treaty would require us to “ensure the development” of child-care institutions, facilities and services. Every child is to be registered at birth, a provision that sounds like a global registry with I.D. cards issued by the United Nations.

No one is fooled by the treaty’s use of abortion euphemisms such as “her right of access to health care services,” “preventive health care,” “family planning education and services,” “reproductive health services,” and “privacy.” Another treaty right, “equality of the sexes,” has been repeatedly used by the feminists in U.S. courts to require states to pay for Medicaid abortions.

Of course, all these far-reaching UN Treaty goals would not be complete without the establishment of a new international bureaucracy and mechanism of control, so Article 43 sets up a committee of ten so-called “experts.” There is no assurance that any American will be on this committee, or that even one expert will be sensitive to American institutions and traditions.

Nothing proves the hypocrisy of this treaty more than the repeated taunts that every nation has ratified it except the United States and Somalia. Countries have already ratified it that regularly engage in child labor, slavery, mutilation, and selling girls and boys into prostitution, and the United States should not join their club.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is a bad deal for Americans on every count, and we hope the U.S. Senate will have the good judgment never to ratify it.