3 YOU WON'T READ

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Not too often, but from time to time, I post here on ‘Ferret-Faced Fascist Friends’ commentary and articles written by someone other than myself. I prefer to stick with original compositions and smart-assed remarks, but sometimes something is so interesting, or important, or well-researched, that I feel I should pass it on to both of you.

A few days ago, my buddy Br’er Marc sent me an Email which included a short piece written many years ago by journalist Charley Reese. In doing a little web surfing, I discovered that not only is this not presented in its original form, but as it has made the Email rounds, evidently some folks have added sentences to it in an attempt to update it. Furthermore, the copy I received didn’t even have Charley’s name spelled correctly. Nevertheless, I thought this was a very worthwhile read, and so I’m posting below the same version I received (after correcting the misspelled name).

Below the ‘Reese Piece’ are two articles related to the Global Warming hoax, both written by William F. Jasper for The New American magazine. Everyone should read all three of these items. But, unfortunately, they require some serious thought, they aren’t funny and entertaining, and they weren’t penned by Dan Brown, Stephen King, John Grisham or Dean Koontz (i.e., they're not time-wasting pieces of fiction), so few, if any, visitors to this Blog will read all three. And that’s just the way it is . . . Today In America:

545 PEOPLE
By Charley Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 apparently inept selfish human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall.. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses.

Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!


And now on to the subject of Global Warming. First, here is one of my favorite quotes related to the G.W. B.S.

“FOR HOW MANY YEARS MUST THE PLANET COOL BEFORE WE BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE PLANET IS NOT WARMING? FOR HOW MANY YEARS MUST COOLING GO ON?"
~ Geologist Dr. David Gee
Chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

OK, on that note, let's move on to Mr. Jasper's two columns:

CLIMATE “TEACUP TEMPEST”?
By William F. Jasper
The New American; Jan. 4, 2010

“As near as I can tell, Climate-Gate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup,” wrote Kevin Drum in a November 30 column for the left-wing magazine Mother Jones. “There’s nothing questionable there,” he insisted. The tempest-in-a-teacup/no-big-deal trope has been regularly invoked by the proponents of global-warming alarmism to dismiss the significance of what may be one of the biggest science scandals in history.

The “Climategate” to which Drum refers is, of course, the still-developing scandal involving the release of thousands of e-mails and documents from a British climate research center. The leaked documents expose some of the biggest scientific names in the global-warming debate to serious charges of fraud, unethical attacks on colleagues, censorship of opposing viewpoints, and possible criminal destruction of, and withholding of, evidence.

The timing of Climategate has been a major boon to skeptics of catastrophic climate change and a monster headache to alarmists, breaking onto the world scene only three weeks before the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) convened on December 7 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen Schneider, and Kevin Trenberth — some of the biggest names in global-warming alarmism — are unfavorably exposed in the documents that were posted on the Internet on November 20 by unknown hackers who penetrated the computer system of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Great Britain’s University of East Anglia. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and a top guru in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate brain trust, comes off especially poorly in the e-mails. After initially balking at calls to resign or step down, the university announced on December 1 that Jones would be taking temporary leave while an independent inquiry is conducted into the matter.

Climatologist Patrick Michaels, who has long criticized the IPCC process, sees the e-mail scandal far differently than Kevin Drum, and chooses a much different metaphor to describe it. “This is not a smoking gun,” says Dr. Michaels, “this is a mushroom cloud.” On the face of it, it would seem difficult to dispute Professor Michaels’ assessment. The Climategate e-mails provide powerful confirmation of charges by many scientists over the years that the UN’s IPCC process is politically — not scientifically — driven and that claims of scientific “consensus” to justify radical policies are a gross corruption of science. In the past, scientists who questioned the Jones-Mann-IPCC “consensus” have been denounced as “deniers” — a vicious attempt to associate them with Nazi holocaust denial — or “shills” for the fossil-fuel industries … or both. Now, however, scientists who cannot be classified as skeptics — indeed, some are prominent names in the alarmist camp — are challenging the IPCC and the Climategate defendants to come clean and release the data on which they have been basing their dire predictions, but have been withholding from the public and their scientific peers.

“Tricks” and “Consensus”:
In one damaging e-mail that has been widely publicized, Jones writes to colleagues that he has just used “Mike’s Nature trick” of adding other temperature data to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. They had to resort to such trickery because the data conflicted with their claims that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW, is heating up the planet to unacceptable levels and must be curtailed before it leads to irreversible global catastrophe.

The Mike referred to in this message is Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, whose influential “hockey stick” graph utilized statistical manipulation to produce a curve that would support claims of recent human activities causing the warmest period in the past millennia. The now thoroughly discredited “hockey stick,” which was a big component of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, attempted to wipe the Medieval Warm Period, one of the most solidly established periods of climate history, from the historical record.

During the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800–1300), temperatures were higher than today; the Vikings colonized then-balmy Greenland and roamed the ice-free waters of the North Atlantic. If allowed to stand, this inconvenient truth would undercut the alarmists’ exaggerated claims that burning fossil fuels is causing the warmest temperatures in 1,000 years.

In trying to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear, the Jones/Mann team went too far, and other scientists responded with a robust “smack-down” of this attempt to falsify the historical record. However, before Mann was forced to retract some of his most egregious statistical falsifications, he and his allies had managed to vilify many reputable scientists and keep their sham going for several years. In 1998, astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics challenged the Mann-Jones thesis, arguing in the journal Climate Research that the evidence supported the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. Drs. Soon and Baliunas were soon subjected to a smear campaign and six editors at Climate Research were forced to resign for allowing the Soon-Baliunas article to be published.

Now the Climategate e-mails are showing that the corruption of science in the name of “saving the planet” from the supposed scourge of climate change is far more extensive and egregious than the public or the scientific community realized.

In an e-mail of January 29, 2004 to Michael Mann, Phil Jones refers to the recent death of global-warming critic John L. Daly with this churlish comment: “In an odd way this is cheering news!” In the same e-mail, Jones then suggests to Mann that he has obtained legal advice that he does not have to comply with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from other scientists to release data and codes underlying his research claims.

Some of the e-mails seem to confirm concerns that Jones, Mann, et al., have destroyed data that could expose their fraudulent methods. That appears to be the case in a May 29, 2008 e-mail message, in which Jones writes to Mann about deleting data for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4):

Mike, Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.... Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?... Will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

In another e-mail that has shocked and infuriated many in the scientific community, Jones reveals the lengths to which he is willing to go to sabotage fellow scientists in order to maintain the myth of AGW “consensus.” In a July 8, 2004 e-mail, Jones assures Mann that he (Jones) and Kevin Trenberth will censor opposing scientific views from the forthcoming IPCC report. Jones writes:

I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

Similar e-mails paint a picture confirming the charges of critics that Jones, Mann, and other IPCC activists constitute a “climate mafia” or “climate cartel” that punishes dissenters and rewards those who toe the global-warming party line. The e-mails are shedding light on ugly episodes over the past decade or more in which the cartel trashed the reputations of, and slammed doors on, distinguished scientists who dared to dispute the politically ordained AGW orthodoxy. With this kind of control, claims of overwhelming consensus become a self-fulfilling prophecy; contrary opinions are effectively barred from publication in accepted “peer-reviewed” literature. Besides Drs. Soon and Baliunas, other eminent scientists who are trashed or referred to crudely in the CRU e-mails include Richard Lindzen; Hans Von Storch; Sonia Boehmer-Christianson; Patrick Michaels; Roger Pielke, Sr.; Robert Balling; Fred Singer; and Tim Ball.

Huge government grants, impressive computer models, and guaranteed headline stories from sympathetic activists in the media have transformed climate scientists into celebrities and power brokers. However, even with their super computer programs, political connections, and prestigious awards, they still haven’t learned how to predict the weather, let alone control it.

An amusing admission against interest is this comment in an October 12, 2009 Climategate e-mail from Dr. Kevin Trenberth. He is stunned that not only have temperatures not warmed as predicted, but the temperatures have actually hit historic lows in his area, contradicting the supposedly authoritative pronouncements of the climate cartel. Trenberth comments:

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder [Colorado] where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record.

Trenberth then goes on to admit: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Not only did Trenberth, Jones, Mann, et al., miss the current temperature downturn, but none of the IPCC’s highly praised computer models foresaw the global mean temperature decline of the past decade. However, their inability to explain away this enormous fact, which Trenberth admits is “travesty,” has neither diminished the cartel’s certitude nor dampened its zeal for implementing a planetary climate regime.

“Ignore That Man Behind the Curtain”:
For years, the IPCC climate cartel has been using the “Wizard of Oz” defense every time some “Toto” pulls back the curtain to expose the IPCC’s secretive machinations and its sanctimonious claims of “transparency,” “openness,” and “overwhelming consensus.” Inquiring scientists and the general public alike are told not to pay attention to the mysterious process behind the curtain where the fantastic and frightening scenarios of impending doom are being created.

However, two Canadian “Totos” refused to stop tugging on the curtain, and, as a result, have successfully exposed some of the trickery of the IPCC “wizards.” Retired businessman and statistician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick have doggedly pursued the truth and have subjected the IPCC’s “climate science” to rigorous examination. Troubled by unexplained statistical anomalies in Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, they contacted Mann to request copies of his data sets. Mann balked and also refused to divulge publicly the algorithm he had used to concoct his “hockey stick” graph. McIntyre and McKitrick published several articles challenging Mann’s work on a number of key points. Their path-breaking research sparked a congressional hearing validated by two independent academic panels, one of which was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences.

McIntyre and McKitrick have continued their independent investigations on their award-winning Internet website, ClimateAudit.com, which has won the respect of even many AGW proponents. However, it is clear that Mann, Jones, and the climate cartel regard the two dauntless sleuths as the enemy, and they are the subject of many Climategate e-mails, often referred to as “MM” or “the two MMs.”

In an incriminating CRU e-mail of February 2, 2005, Jones writes to Mann:

The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Oops! The Dog Ate It:
The climate cartel, it appears, has already carried through on the data deletion threat. Scientists at the University of East Anglia CRU have admitted throwing out much of the raw data on which their ominous predictions are based.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” What happened to the original data? According to the CRU, it was discarded back in the 1980s. What this means is that the original CRU data cannot be checked or replicated, which means that the graphs, research, and predictions supposedly based on the missing data is worthless. The available “value-added” and “homogenised” data would also then be worthless, since there would be no way to verify or replicate it.

How many other data sets have likewise been “lost” or “accidentally deleted”? We may soon find out, as official investigations and FOIA lawsuits progress. In the meantime, we are simply supposed to trust the IPCC “experts” who say that we must “invest” trillions of dollars for mitigation and reparation of past carbon consumption, as well as for prevention of future warming.

IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele tried to minimize the significance of the e-mail scandal as the Copenhagen conference opened by claiming that Climategate only pertains to one data set out of many that confirm the serious peril posed by anthropogenic global warming.

“It doesn’t change anything in the IPCC’s conclusions,” said van Ypersele, “it’s only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence.” This is the party line echoed by most of the AGW alarmists in government, media, and environmental activist circles. Along with this corollary: The skeptics (or “deniers,” “shills”) are exploiting the e-mail controversy simply to sabotage Copenhagen and distract the scientists and politicians from the important work they must conclude there.

“We mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate LORsceptics,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the Guardian. “We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and … seal the deal.”

Brown’s Environmental Secretary, Ed Miliband, was even more scathing, describing skeptics as “dangerous and deceitful.” “The approach of the climate saboteurs is to misuse data and mislead people,” he charged. Miliband’s accusations are especially audacious, inasmuch as it is his alarmist camp, not the skeptics (or “climate realists,” as many prefer to call themselves), that has been caught red-handed misusing data. “The skeptics are playing politics with science in a dangerous and deceitful manner,” Miliband continued, then concluded with this warning: “There is no easy way out of tackling climate change despite what they would have us believe. The evidence is clear and the time we have to act is short. To abandon this process now would lead to misery and catastrophe for millions.”

According to van Ypersele, “We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.”

Professor Judith Curry has provided van Ypersele, Miliband, Brown, the IPCC, and other alarmists with an easy solution to this problem: Stop hiding your data and stop engaging in the hostile “tribalism” displayed in the infamous e-mail attacks on fellow scientists. Dr. Curry is no “climate skeptic.” In fact, she is an AGW true believer, an IPCC expert reviewer, and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Curry says:

Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.

In other words, why not actually practice the transparency and openness that the UN and IPCC claim to favor? Don’t hold your CO2 while waiting for that to happen.


LORD MONCKTON, THE COPENHAGEN TREATY, AND THE CONSTITUTION
By William F. Jasper
The New American; Dec. 21, 2009

In an October 14 speech to the Minnesota Free Market Institute in St. Paul, Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, delivered a devastating fusillade against the alleged science underpinning the hysterical claims of global-warming alarmists. Lord Monckton’s brilliant presentation, combining a stunning array of slides, charts, graphs, scientific studies, and statistical facts with scathing, satirical wit, became an instant Internet sensation.

The greater part of Monckton’s discourse was aimed at dispelling the innumerable fallacies parading as “scientific consensus” concerning the supposedly imminent apocalyptic demise resulting from human-caused climate change. As such, he introduced little that was different from what he and other climate realists have been saying for years. It was several provocative statements in his closing comments that created an uproar, earning him both plaudits on the Right and venom from the Left.

Here is where he lit the phosphorus:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your President will sign it.... And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” — because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t, and we’ve been screwing up the climate. We haven’t been screwing up the climate but that’s the line. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement...

So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it — now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

It’s easy to see why the “greenies” and globalists, who have invested so much time, effort, and money since Stockholm ’72 (the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP) and Rio ’92 (the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED, more popularly known as the Earth Summit), would get all frothy at the mouth over having their plans so baldly exposed. But Lord Monckton is on very solid terra firma, as anyone who has read the Copenhagen treaty texts and/or has followed the continuous exposés in these pages over the past three dec-ades of the UN’s environmental agenda for global control, would surely recognize.

Annex I, Article 38 of the Copenhagen treaty (officially known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC) states: “The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism.”

Yes, as the excerpt above indicates — along with many others in the text — the conveners of the Copenhagen summit envision a world government. Here’s how they describe it in the same article 38 of the UNFCCC (page 18):

The government will be ruled by the COP [Conference of the Parties] with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.

No checks and balances worthy of the name. No legitimate “rule of law,” despite the constant appeal to that phrase by those perpetrating this perversion of the principle. Only a blatant assault on national sovereignty and outrageous usurpation of virtually unlimited power to rule, regulate, and tax the entire planet. This is what the UN and its one-world advocates have been pursuing for decades. That is what French President Jacques Chirac was heralding in 2000 when he praised the predecessor to Copenhagen, the Kyoto Protocol, as “the first component of an authentic global governance.”

Lord Monckton’s reference to the communist character of the Copenhagen scheme has also caused predictable rage, gnashing of teeth, and catcalls from the usual quarters that object to any exposure of the Marxist-Leninist pedigree and bearing of any favored project, individual, or organization. But, once again, Monckton is spot on. Many of the communists became “Watermelon Marxists”: green on the outside, red on the inside. And the lead watermelon, Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of Green Cross International, kicked off the wholesale transformation with his celebrated 1992 “End of the Cold War” speech in Fulton, Missouri.

“The prospect of catastrophic climatic changes, more frequent droughts, floods, hunger, epidemics, national-ethnic conflicts, and other similar catastrophes compels governments to adopt a world perspective and seek generally applicable solutions,” Gorbachev declared. And to make this desired objective happen, he said, would require “some kind of global government.”

“I believe,” said Gorbachev, who still describes himself as a Leninist, “that the new world order will not be fully realized unless the United Nations and its Security Council create structures … which are authorized to impose sanctions and make use of other measures of compulsion.” Compulsion, force — on a global scale — that’s what it’s all about. That is what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was saying, in a more subtle way, in his October 25, 2009 New York Times op-ed about Copenhagen. “A deal must include an equitable global governance structure,” the Secretary-General proclaimed. Like Gorbachev, he invoked apocalyptic rhetoric to justify his proposed world government, asserting, “All agree that climate change is an existential threat to humankind.”

Where Monckton Goes Awry:
As Lord Monckton’s timely speech continues to circulate, it will undoubtedly do much to awaken many Americans and speed the crumbling of the incredible non-crisis hoax known as climate change. However, in his effort to stir Americans to action against the Copenhagen treaty, Lord Monckton has inadvertently fallen into a trap, one that has claimed many another otherwise well-informed and well-intentioned Jeremiah. He warns, in these grave words:

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution, and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties. And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your President will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back.

Unfortunately, Lord Monckton, like most Americans, has fallen victim to the intentional campaign of disinformation concerning the “supremacy clause” in the United States Constitution. Like many other texts in our Constitution, this section has been ripped out of context and twisted by those who hope to undo the protections the Founders of our Republic struggled so intensely to give us. One of the most important proponents of this attack on our constitutional system was John Foster Dulles, who would become Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In an April 11, 1952 speech, Dulles declared:

Treaties make international law and also they make domestic law. Under our Constitution, treaties become the supreme law of the land.... Treaty law can override the Constitution. Treaties, for example, … can cut across the rights given the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.

John Foster Dulles was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has been the lead organization promoting the notion that treaties and “international law” trump the Constitution. As far back as 1928, in its Survey of American Relations, the Council complained against our Constitution’s checks and balances and separations of power. These features, which most Americans would consider the most cherished blessings of our form of government, the CFR authors claimed “militate against the development of responsible government.” According to the CFR, it would be more “responsible” to model our government after the European parliamentary system and make treaties easier to pass by substituting “a majority of both houses for two-thirds of the Senate in treaty ratification.” Why? Because Dulles and his one-world cohorts at the Council wanted to use the treaty power gradually to intertwine and merge the American government into a global government.

They didn’t succeed in changing the two-thirds Senate vote requirement in the Constitution, but they have very nearly succeeded by winning many politicians, jurists, and legal scholars over to the position that not only treaties, but executive agreements, “international norms,” and even “testimony” and “statements” by so-called “experts” at international fora can override the Constitution because they constitute “international customary law.”

What does the Constitution actually say concerning treaties? The treaty powers are dealt with in Article II, Section 2 and Article III, Section 2, but the main cause of confusion is Article VI, Section 2, the “supremacy clause,” which states:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Dulles and the advocates of unlimited treaty power have exploited confusion over the grammar and syntax in the above passage to make it say something that it doesn’t. It is important to note first of all that when referring to “this Constitution,” the Founders are referring to the United States Constitution, while the later “the Constitution” refers to State constitutions. Secondly, they are stating that the U.S. Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” along with federal laws and treaties that are “made in pursuance of” and “under the authority of” that Constitution. Obviously, if a treaty or federal law clashes with the Constitution, then it does not meet those qualifications and is null and void. That is not merely this writer’s opinion, but the stated intent of the men who framed the great document and our earliest and most-esteemed jurists.

James Madison, who was the secretary of the Philadelphia Convention and has justly been called “the Father of the Constitution,” said of the scope of the treaty power:

I do not conceive that power is given to the President and the Senate to dismember the empire, or alienate any great, essential right. I do not think the whole legislative authority have this power. The exercise of the power must be consistent with the object of the delegation.

In addition to his many other famous words and deeds, Thomas Jefferson authored the authoritative reference work, A Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which became a standard handbook for both the House and Senate. In it, Jefferson said of treaty power:

It is admitted that it must concern the foreign nation, party to the contract, or it would be a mere nullity.... 2. By the general power to make treaties, the Constitution must have intended to comprehend only those objects which are usually regulated by treaty, and cannot be otherwise regulated. 3. It must have meant to except out of those the rights reserved to the states; for surely the President and Senate cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way.

This is both sound legal opinion and plain, common sense. If the Bill of Rights and the whole Constitution were to have any lasting force and meaning, it could not have been intended that they could be completely undone by means of treaty. Or as Jefferson rightly observed: “I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution.”

Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal authors of The Federalist, concurs on this important point. “A treaty cannot be made,” Hamilton maintained, “which alters the Constitution of the country or which infringes any express exceptions to the power of the Constitution of the United States.” This is the consistent position taken by the authors of The Federalist on the supremacy clause in essays #33 (Hamilton), #44 (Madison), and #64 (Jay).

The United States Supreme Court in Reid v. Covert (1957) restated these foundational principles. After quoting the same Article VI, Section 2 supremacy clause we quoted above, the Court declares:

There is nothing in this language which intimates that treaties and laws enacted pursuant to them do not have to comply with the provisions of the Constitution. Nor is there anything in the debates which accompanied the drafting and ratification of the Constitution which even suggests such a result.... The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined.

Nevertheless, the advocates of world government (or “global governance,” as they prefer to call it today) boast a stellar lineup of judges, law-school professors, Senators, Congressmen, journalists, and academics who insist American sovereignty must yield to global “necessity,” and our Constitution must give way to “international law.” And Copenhagen is but one of many UN treaties and agreements that are battering our constitutional ramparts. It is up to the American people to hold the feet of their Senators and Representatives to the fire and strike down as a “mere nullity” (Jefferson’s words) these boundless grabs for power.

If you made it all the way through these three articles but found them boring and unworthy of your time, then please accept my apology and my promise to be more frivolous and entertaining the next time.

~ Stephen T. McCarthy
Doggtor of Unread Blog Bits

Related Links:

The New World Order

The Council On Foreign Relations

Global Warming B.S.

YE OLDE COMMENT POLICY: All comments, pro and con, are welcome, however, ad hominem attacks and disrespectful epithets will not be tolerated (read: "posted"). Besides, I "sort of do debate martial arts", so there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth. In other words, don't make me have to come over there - I'm just too tired. Play nice.

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