Washington is buzzing with a columnist’s report that Secretary of State George Shultz, at a cocktail party he gave for political appointees, called Senator Jesse Helms a constitutional ignoramus. In an angry outburst, Shultz accused Helms of “treading on the Constitution” by interfering with the appointive power of the President.
What precipitated this outburst was Helms’ objection to a foreign policy appointment favored by Shultz. There is no record that Shultz or any other Cabinet official had any tantrums when Reagan’s appointments of conservatives to the judiciary or other positions were savaged by Senators Lowell Weicker, Howard Metzenbaum, Charles Mathias, et al.
I’m glad Shultz brought up the subject of the proper deference that one branch of the Federal Government should show another. If anyone should be called names for not understanding the Constitution, it should be those who are demanding that the Reagan Administration obey the SALT II Treaty which was never ratified by our Senate.
The U.S. Constitution empowers the President only “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Anybody who thinks that the President can act alone is truly a “constitutional ignoramus.”
The Senate refused to ratify the Versailles (League of Nations) Treaty signed by Woodrow Wilson, the Genocide Treaty of the Truman Administration, and the SALT II Treaty signed by Jimmy Carter. The Senate’s bottom-line reason was the same in each case: the treaty was harmful to the best interests of the United States.
So all those treaties are null and void under U.S. law. It’s true that Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sealed the SALT II Treaty with a kiss in a famous news photo taken in Vienna on June 18, 1979, but a kiss simply won’t substitute for two-thirds of the Senate.
The SALT II Treaty accords the Soviet Union superiority in almost every category of strategic nuclear weapons. It allows the Soviets to build everything they need to achieve a first-strike capability and decisive nuclear superiority, while the treaty forbids the United States to catch up. The Soviets do not need to cheat; they can do it all legally under SALT II.
The SALT II Treaty allows each side a false “equality” of 2,250 strategic offensive weapons, but does not limit the carrying capacity of individual weapons or of total weapons force. This is like saying that two intercontinental freight-moving firms are “equal” when each one has 2,250 “delivery vehicles,” even though one firm has all 50-ton tractor-trailers and the other has only one-ton pickup trucks.
Our principal ICBM, the Minuteman, has a maximum “carrying capacity” of one megaton; the Soviets have 308 SS-18 monster ICBMs with a “carrying capacity” of 50 megatons each. The treaty allows the Soviets to keep all their 308 SS-18s; we have nothing comparable and the treaty forbids us to build any.
The treaty prevents the United States from catching up with the superior numbers of the Soviets’ land-based missile force even though the Soviets admitted in a SALT II “Memorandum of Understanding” that they have 344 more ICBMs than we have, most of which are vastly more powerful than ours.
The treaty allows the Soviets to retain their massive superiority in throw-weight by “limiting” each side to the maximum missile throw-weight it had in 1979. This means a Soviet advantage of at least two-to-one over us.
The treaty has a complicated, interlocking limitation on the numbers of MIRVs (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles). Again, the treaty limits only the numbers but not the power of MIRVs, giving the Soviets another tremendous advantage.
In campaigning for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan correctly called SALT II “fatally flawed.” In June 1984, the Senate affirmed by 99-0 that nothing in international law requires the United States to comply with a treaty the Soviet Union violates (and all reports confirm that the Soviets have been systematically violating SALT II).
Likewise, there is nothing in U.S. law that requires us to comply with an unratified treaty. When Senator Helms objects to the United States dismantling a perfectly usable Poseidon missile-carrying submarine so that the launching of one new Trident sub will not exceed the MIRV limits in SALT II, he is showing more knowledge of the Constitution (as well as common sense) than Secretary Shultz.
