Neocon,
<<Congress cannot be by-passed on a matter like this, and any attempt to do so would automatically land in the Supreme Court...>>
Congress can and "is" being by-passed through President Bill Clinton's use of Treaty's and executive orders. Please see both articles below:
Shawn
Clinton's Abuse of the Treaty-Making Power
July 19, 2000 by: Phyllis Schlafly
Annoyed with the Senate's refusal to ratify his various United
Nations treaties, Bill Clinton is arrogantly trying to bypass the
Senate by signing international agreements to implement them
anyway. Each one cedes more U.S. sovereignty to some global
organization, and we wonder if self-government can survive the final
six months of his Administration.
Clinton knows that his proposed United Nations Convention (treaty)
on the Rights of the Child will never be ratified by the Senate
because it would be a codification of Hillary's plan to put the global
"village" in charge of raising children instead of parents. But last
week Clinton disembarked from the tall ships parade in New York
harbor, walked into the United Nations, and made an end-run around
that obstacle by signing two protocols to the unratified Convention
on the Rights of the Child.
The first of these protocols, a pet project of the United Nations
Children's Fund (UNICEF), would prohibit military service by minors.
This encountered stiff resistance from the Pentagon because every
year the U.S. Armed Services enlists about 50,000 high school
seniors before their 18th birthday. Clinton worked out a compromise;
he agreed not to send them into combat until their 18th birthday.
I guess the negotiators haven't seen "The Patriot" in which Mel
Gibson gives guns to his 10- and 13-year-old sons when British
soldiers threatened their family. In any event, the age at which we
allow men to serve our country should be a U.S. decision, not one
determined by a Clinton treaty or regulated by a commission of
foreign bureaucrats, the kind of paper-pushers who expect
Americans to do all the fighting and dying in their wars anyway.
The protocol's first paragraph makes its real purpose clear. It is "to
achieve the purposes of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
and the implementation of its provisions."
The protocol is quite lengthy, nine pages of fine print. That gives the
global commission lots of excuses to inject itself into U.S. laws and
behavior.
Article 12, for example, requires that we submit, within two years, a
report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Since that
committee is a creation of Article 44 of the unratified treaty on the
Rights of the Child, this is another way that Clinton's protocol locks
us into the unratified treaty.
The second protocol that Clinton signed last week would make it a
crime to sell children for sex, to engage minors in prostitution, or to
use them for pornography. Again, the real purpose is to validate UN
authority, not to protect children.
Of course, those acts are already crimes in the United States. The
countries that engage in such behavior will not be deterred by some
piece of paper that Clinton signed.
Furthermore, the UN committee set up to monitor compliance under
the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) recently ordered China (which has ratified
that treaty) to allow women to sell their bodies as "sex workers."
The UN committee calls prostitution a "reproductive right" over one's
body.
Despite this ruling, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala said on May 31
that the Clinton Administration will continue to push for Senate
approval of CEDAW. She added that the Clinton Administration is
"quite frustrated on the inability to ratify CEDAW," for which she
blames Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse
Helms.
While in Cologne, Germany, on June 20, 1999, Clinton announced
that he and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin had agreed to
negotiate amendments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty. This was a follow-up to the "Memorandum of Understanding"
on the 1972 ABM Treaty signed by Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright on September 26, 1997.
This charade is a dishonest attempt to manufacture a new treaty
that takes the decision about defending America against a missile
attack away from Congress and cedes it to foreign countries,
something that the Senate would never approve. Clinton is using the
ploy of these new executive agreements to try to resuscitate the
now-moribund 1972 ABM Treaty, which is actually null and void
because the Soviet Union no longer exists.
Everything about this treaty-bypass ploy is hurtful to the United
States. Clinton is pretending that the successors to the former
Soviet Union are four states -- Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and
Ukraine -- but the remaining 11 countries of the former Soviet Union
would be free to develop and deploy ABM systems.
Clinton told the United Nations General Assembly on September 22,
1997 that he wants to take America into a "web of institutions and
arrangements" that will set "the international ground rules for the
21st century." Unable to get the advice and consent of the Senate,
he is using his last few months to try to bypass the Constitution and
do it anyway.
Will Congress let him get by such underhanded actions?
Phyllis Schlafly column 7-19-00
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BLOCKED BY CONGRESS, CLINTON WIELDS A PEN
nytimes.com
July 5, 2000
By MARC LACEY
WASHINGTON, July 4 -- Congress appears intent on denying President Clinton
major legislative victories in his final months of office, but White House
officials say they will continue drafting and carrying out policies,
Congress or no Congress, until Mr. Clinton's final day.
Through executive orders, memorandums, proclamations, regulations and other
flexing of presidential power, Mr. Clinton has already put in effect a host
of measures concerning the environment, health care and civil rights. And
with the presidential campaign in high gear, and the Republican-controlled
Congress not inclined to give Democrats any boost, Mr. Clinton's aides
intend to continue making policy by decree -- putting federal land off
limits to development, reorganizing government agencies, tightening
pollution control rules and pushing other measures that would otherwise
stand little chance of congressional passage.
Mr. Clinton has been especially frustrated that many of his nominees for
judgeships, ambassadorships and other posts have failed to be confirmed by
the Senate. But he is not surrendering in that area either. If Congress
fails to act on some of the nominations later this month, White House aides
say they expect the president to make recess appointments in August that
would require no Congressional approval.
"This president will be signing executive orders right up until the morning
of Jan. 20, 2001," said Bruce N. Reed, the president's domestic policy
adviser. "In our experience, when the administration takes executive action,
it not only leads to results while the political process is stuck in
neutral, but it often spurs Congress to follow suit."
Last Saturday, in a radio address on high prices for gasoline and other
fuels, Mr. Clinton said that if Congress did not act, he would use his own
authority to create a home-heating-oil reserve to help avoid shortages in
the Northeast. The House has approved such a reserve, but the Senate has not
acted on the proposal. Mr. Clinton said he had asked Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson "to take the steps necessary to create a reserve through
administrative authority if Congress does fail to act, so that a heating oil
reserve will be in place next winter."
Another goal of executive actions these days, of course, is to aid Vice
President Al Gore's presidential bid. It was Mr. Clinton who signed the
order earlier this year granting increased protection to 250,000 acres of
federal land in Oregon and Washington State. But it was Mr. Gore who
announced the creation of the Cascade-Siskiyou and Hanford Reach National
Monuments, an act that pleased environmentalists.
Over the course of his seven and a half years as president, Mr. Clinton has
signed an average of about one executive order or other policy-making
declaration a week, or 450 in all, according to the Office of Management and
Budget. That far exceeds the executive actions taken by former Presidents
George Bush and Ronald Reagan, whose orders riled Congressional Democrats
just as much as Mr. Clinton's have angered Republicans on Capitol Hill.
"I think what this president is doing is pretty typical when Congress is
controlled by the other party," said Louis Fisher, who has studied executive
authority for the Congressional Research Service. "Certainly, Nixon did the
same thing."
But the fact that presidents in both parties have engaged in the practice --
President George Washington, a Federalist, issued the first one in 1793
dealing with American neutrality in the war between Britain and France --
does not assuage the frustration on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers argue that the Constitution gives them, not Mr. Clinton, the
authority to pass laws.
"Even though I disagree with the president on many of the issues, the bigger
concern is the erosion of the foundation that our founding fathers put in
place," said Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. "It's very
dangerous for a president to implement policy by essentially debasing the
constitutional structure."
Republicans have complained most fervently about Mr. Clinton's liberal use
of the Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect "objects of historic and
scientific interest." The protests began in earnest in 1996 when Mr. Clinton
set up the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in
Utah, which was opposed by Republican lawmakers in the state. Recent
presidential directives protect land in California, Arizona and other
states.
Mr. Clinton points to his predecessors to justify his approach. Former
President Jimmy Carter, for instance, signed an order creating a national
monument in Alaska that exceeded 53 million acres. Mr. Clinton now holds the
record for total land set aside in the lower 48 states.
On Friday, asked about whether he was overstepping his role, Mr. Clinton
delivered an impromptu history of the executive branch that compared his
actions with those of other presidents. Mr. Clinton acknowledged that the
office he holds has grown over the years, but he said many of his
predecessors have advanced the power of the presidency without interrupting
the constitutional balance envisioned by the founders.
Mr. Clinton noted that Thomas Jefferson had agreed to the Louisiana Purchase
for a sum that was roughly the total annual budget for the federal
government at the time. "Can you imagine what the Congress would say if I
said I want to buy a little land but it will only cost $1.8 trillion?" Mr.
Clinton said with a smile. (In fact, the treaty with France to cede its vast
territories to the United States had to be ratified by the Senate, and
Congress passed a number of laws in 1803 to carry out the transaction.)
No consensus has emerged on Capitol Hill on whether future presidents ought
to be reined in. Legislation limiting the acres that presidents can protect
with the stroke of a pen cleared the House but not the Senate. Bills
requiring Mr. Clinton to justify his executive orders to Congress or win
subsequent approval from lawmakers have also stalled.
Just once has a court ruled that Mr. Clinton has overstepped his bounds,
after he signed an order in 1995 that banned awarding federal contracts to
employers that permanently replace striking employees. Several members of
Congress filed suit to block another order to protect rivers, but a federal
court ruled that the lawmakers' injury was "clearly institutional rather
than personal." In another instance, the House voted in 1998 to deny money
to carry out an executive order dealing with when the federal government
could get involved in state and local matters. Mr. Clinton later withdrew
the order.
Executive actions can be undone just as quickly as they were put in effect.
But White House officials say a future president would face political
constraints against reducing protections on federal lands. On other matters,
Mr. Clinton himself showed how quickly presidential declarations can
disappear.
Days after Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, he told Donna E. Shalala,
secretary for health and human services, to overturn former President Bush's
moratorium on federal financing of research involving fetal tissues from
induced abortions.
Lawmakers have little doubt that the next president, whether it is Mr. Gore
or Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, will continue the pattern of past
presidents.
"I do not believe that the romance with the executive order is restricted to
the Clinton White House," said Representative George W. Gekas, Republican of
Pennsylvania, who has held hearings on the issue. "Every president has used
them.
Some, though, have used more restraint than others."
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