{"id":233125,"date":"2016-03-21T23:19:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T23:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=233125"},"modified":"2016-03-23T17:33:35","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T17:33:35","slug":"nafta-obamas-proposed-trade-deals-unconstitutional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/nafta-obamas-proposed-trade-deals-unconstitutional\/","title":{"rendered":"NAFTA and Obama’s Proposed ‘Trade’ Deals Are UnConstitutional"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

NAFTA and other mega-\u2018trade\u2019 deals are actually about lots more than merely\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019; they\u2019re about sovereignty\u00a0\u2014 the ability of each of the participating nations to establish laws and regulations restricting toxicity of products, environmental pollution, protecting workers\u2019 rights, and many other things that are essential to the public’s welfare. These\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019 deals lock-in existing laws and regulations so that no matter what is found by future scientific studies which may indicate, for example, that a given product is actually far more toxic than had previously been known, the laws and regulations can\u2019t be increased, because any such increase would subject the given nation to multi-billion-dollar lawsuits by international corporations for\u00a0\u2018infringing on the rights of stockholders to profit\u2019 by any stiffening of those regulations existing at the time the\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019 deal became law. Thus, for the first time in world history, the rights of the holders of the controlling blocs of stock in international corporations are coming to supersede the rights of any government, so that those stockholders can sue taxpayers of any such country, not in any democratically accountable court and judicial system, but in private panels of unaccountable international\u00a0\u2018arbitrators\u2019 who won\u2019t be subject to any nation\u2019s laws<\/span><\/a>. It\u2019s an international-corporate world government now forming, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits the U.S. from being any part of it (because what\u2019s forming is an international-corporate dictatorship<\/span><\/a>); so, in the U.S., it\u2019s being done entirely unConstitutionally.<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Treaty Clause<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of the U.S. Constitution says:<\/span><\/p>\n

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the\u00a0Senate, to\u00a0make\u00a0Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The Trade Act of 1974 introduced a new way to pass a treaty, the way now called Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority, by means of which that two-thirds requirement can be eliminated and\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019 deals can now become law merely by being approved by 50%+1 members of the Senate. This was done because President Richard Nixon and some members of Congress wanted to be able to pass into law treaties that would be so controversial (so odious, actually) that approval by two-thirds of the Senate wouldn\u2019t be possible; such proposed treaties wouldn\u2019t be able to become approved in this country unless the two-thirds-rule were eliminated for them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By means of the Trade Act of 1974, these very controversial treaties would be able to become law in the U.S. by the simple device that, though America\u2019s Founders would certainly have called them\u00a0\u201ctreaties,\u201d and though they actually are<\/i>\u00a0 called\u00a0\u201ctreaties\u201d by all of the other nations that sign them, our government would instead call them merely \u201cinternational agreements\u201d not\u00a0\u201ctreaties\u201d (though the two are synonymous with one-another<\/span><\/a>) and would thus nullify the Treaty Clause without needing to amend the U.S. Constitution (and, of course, the only way legitimately<\/i>\u00a0 to amend anything in the Constitution is by means of its Amendment-process).<\/span><\/p>\n

America\u2019s Founders were wise, and were extraordinarily learned about history; and the U.S. Constitution embodies this unique wisdom and learning; the Treaty Clause\u2019s two-thirds requirement exemplifies that. It is a crucial part of their determination to prevent any President from having too much power \u2014 from becoming a dictator (something that becomes even worse if the dictator has rammed through not only mere laws, but also treaties<\/i>, since those are far harder to undo<\/i>). For example: it was intended to block any President from making a treaty with a foreign nation if that treaty would be so bad that he couldn\u2019t get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to support it. (That\u2019s a tough requirement for any President to meet on anything, but a treaty is far more difficult than any other law is to cancel; and, so, passing it is passing a law that\u2019s virtually permanent and virtually impossible to modify. The Constitution wasn\u2019t designed in order to meet the convenience of Presidents, nor of Presidents plus half of the U.S. Senate, but to protect the public<\/i>.) And their wisdom is why our constitution remains the world\u2019s longest-lasting one. But, at least in this regard, it has been abandoned \u2014 and only the U.S. Supreme Court can decide now whether to restore it.<\/span><\/p>\n

As\u00a0Alexander Hamilton wrote on 9 January 1796<\/span><\/a>, defending the new Constitution, and especially its Treaty Clause: \u201cI aver, that it was understood by all to be the intent of the provision [the Treaty Clause] to give to that power the most ample latitude to render it competent to all the stipulations, which the exigencies of National Affairs might require\u2014competent to the making of Treaties of Alliance, Treaties of Commerce, Treaties of Peace and every other species of Convention usual among nations and competent in the course of its exercise to controul & bind the legislative power of Congress. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two thirds of the Senate with the President being required to make a Treaty. I appeal for this with confidence.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He went further: \u201cIt will not be disputed that the words \u2018Treaties and alliances\u2019 are of equivalent import and of no greater force than the single word Treaties. An alliance is only a species of Treaty, a particular of a general. And the power of \u2018entering into Treaties,\u2019 which terms confer the authority under which the former Government acted, will not be pretended to be stronger than the power \u2018to make Treaties,\u2019 which are the terms constituting the authority under which the present Government acts.\u201d The phrase \u201cinternational agreement\u201d was not mentioned by him because no one at that time had even so much as suggested that the term \u201ctreaty\u201d was anything else than identical in meaning to an \u201cinternational agreement\u201d; everyone understood and accepted that any \u201ctreaty\u201d was an \u201cinternational agreement,\u201d and that any \u201cinternational agreement\u201d was a \u201ctreaty.\u201d So: there can be no doubt that the term \u201ctreaty\u201d refers to any and all types of international agreements. This was the Founders\u2019 clear and unequivocal intent. No court under this Constitution possesses any power to change that, because they can\u2019t change history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, George Washington\u2019s famous Farewell Address asserted that, \u201dIt is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world\u201d; and the third President Thomas Jefferson said in his equally famous Inaugural Address, that there should be “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations \u2014 entangling alliances with none.\u201d Jefferson\u2019s comment there was also a succinct tip-of-the-hat to yet another major concern that the Founders had regarding treaties \u2014 that by discriminating in favor of the treaty-partners, they also discriminate\u00a0against<\/i>\u00a0 non-partner nations, and so endanger \u201cpeace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,\u201d which was the Founders\u2019 chief goal in their foreign policies. But, the Founders\u2019 chief concern was the mere recognition that treaties tend to be far more \u201cpermanent\u201d and \u201centangling\u201d than any purely national laws. This was the main reason why treaties need to be made much more difficult to\u00a0become<\/i>\u00a0 laws.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamilton was quite explicit that the Treaty Clause pertained “to the making of Treaties of Alliance, Treaties of Commerce, Treaties of Peace and every other species of Convention usual among nations and competent in the course of its exercise to controul & bind the legislative power of Congress. And it was emphatically for this reason that it was so carefully guarded; the cooperation of two thirds of the Senate with the President being required to make a Treaty.\u201d He did not exclude \u201cTreaties of Commerce.\u201d Even the\u00a0possibility<\/i>\u00a0 of allowing such an exception to the Treaty Clause was denied by him. And yet, starting with the Trade Act of 1974, it happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

Each one of the\u00a037 Senators<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(4 more than would have been required under the Treaty Clause to block) who voted against Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority (and\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>\u00a0almost exactly the same 37 Senators voted against Fast Track the final time around) should possess the standing to bring this issue to the U.S. Supreme Court for the Court’s determination as to what the Founders meant, and didn\u2019t mean, by their asserting, “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the\u00a0Senate<\/span><\/a>, to make\u00a0Treaties<\/span><\/a>, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.\u201d Each one of these Senators might be able to make history here. Each one of the Senators might thus affect the future course of world history by bringing this terrifically important issue to the Supreme Court to be decided, once and for all. However, none has cared enough even to try. But it\u2019s clear: any \u201cinternational agreement\u201d is a \u201ctreaty,\u201d and any \u201ctreaty\u201d is an \u201cinternational agreement.\u201d No one even questioned that at the time the Constitution was written.<\/span><\/p>\n

THE MAIN U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL ISSUE<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

In June 1954, Morris D. Forkosch headlined in\u00a0Chicago-Kent Law Review<\/i>,\u00a0\u201cTreaties and Executive Agreements,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and summarized the status of this issue up into the start of the Eisenhower Administration. It was a different nation then. He noted: \u201cSuppose, however, that a treaty conflicts with a provision of\u00a0the United States Constitution or contradicts the terms of a federal\u00a0statute. Which, then, governs? In the first of these situations, the United States Supreme Court has indicated, albeit the\u00a0language is obiter, that the treaty would be ineffective.29\u201d (His footnote included: \u201cDeGeofroy v. Riggs, 133 U. S. 258 at 267, 10 S. Ct. 295, 33 L. Ed. 642 at 645\u00a0(1890), and Fort Leavenworth R. R. Co. v. Lowe, 114 U. S. 525 at 541, 5 S. Ct. 995,\u00a029 L. Ed. 264 at 270 (1885).\u201d) So:\u00a0according to U.S. Supreme Court decisions up till at least 1954, any one of the five Fast-Tracked international trade agreements that has been passed since the Fast-Track law, the Trade Act of 1974, was passed, would have been blocked by the Supreme Court, were it not for the Trade Act of 1974 \u2014 a mere law that, supposedly, has changed the Constitution without amending it, but that did this simply by asserting that when the Founders said \u201ctreaty\u201d they weren\u2019t referring to any and all forms of international agreement \u2014 which they clearly were referring to, in their era.<\/b>\u00a0(If you doubt it, you\u2019ll find in my\u00a0\u201cThe Two Contending Visions of World Government,\u201d<\/span><\/a> this issue being discussed within its broader context. Key there is that the term \u201ctreaty\u201d in the Founders\u2019 era meant any type of international agreement, no exceptions. An originalist interpretation of the Constitution would thus be obliged to outlaw the Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority provision of the Trade Act of 1974.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, the power to interpret the Constitution rests solely with the U.S. Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the words that are in the Constitution as closely as possible to the way the Founders who wrote it intended those terms to be understood to mean. That\u2019s just basic, to any constitutional democracy. (Even non-originalist theories of Constitutional interpretation affirm that the overriding concern is the<\/span>\u00a0“larger purpose\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the animating spirit\u00a0\u2014\u00a0of the Constitution,”<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0which ultimately refers to the intentions of the majority of the people who signed the document.)\u00a0There is no getting around the fact that Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority is unConstitutional. But attempts have been made to get around its being<\/i>\u00a0 unConstitutional.<\/span><\/p>\n

In February 2001,\u00a0Michigan Law Review<\/i>\u00a0published John C. Yoo\u2019s January 2000 article,<\/span>\u00a0\u201cLaws as Treaties: The Constitutionality of Congressional-Executive Agreements,\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0in which Yoo, the lawyer who subsequently provided to George W. Bush the rationalization for Bush\u2019s authorization to use torture after 9\/11, argued that the two-thirds Senate rule needs, for practical purposes, to be nullified for certain types of international trade agreements, including for the five that had already been Fast-Tracked. Rather than his dealing with the question of whether the Executive and the Legislative branches possess Constitutional authority to interpret the Constitution, he wrote there the argument that he would present to the Judicial branch, at the U.S. Supreme Court, if he were to be the attorney arguing there for the Constitutionality of Fast-Track. (Perhaps this paper was even one of the reasons why he was selected by Bush.) His entire argument was pragmatic as he saw it, such as, this: \u201cToday, however, the Senate has about fifty percent more members than the first House of Representatives envisioned by the Constitution, suggesting that the Senate no longer has the small numbers that the Framers believed necessary for successful diplomacy.\u201d This sort of thing constituted his argument for why treaties that don\u2019t concern national security and so fall under the President\u2019s Commander-in-Chief authority, shouldn\u2019t be considered to be \u201ctreaties,\u201d but only as \u201cCongressional-Executive Agreements.\u201d That\u2019s as far as anyone has yet gone to rationalize the Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority as being \u2018acceptable\u2019 under the Constitution.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, even Yoo noted, at the time, that the most-prominent scholarly argument in favor of the Constitutionality of Fast-Track,\u00a0\u201cIs NAFTA Constitutional?\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0by Bruce Ackerman and David Golove, in the February 1995\u00a0Harvard Law Review<\/i>, was a \u201cprovocative and idiosyncratic theory of unwritten constitutional amendments,\u201d whereas Yoo didn\u2019t have the nerve to demean, but only to note, the article by Laurence Tribe,\u00a0\u201cTaking Text and Structure Seriously,”<\/span><\/a>\u00a0in that same publication, which utterly demolished the Ackerman-Golove article. In December 1998, Golove came forth in\u00a0New York University Law Review<\/i>, with a 152-page treatise,\u00a0\u201cAgainst Free-Form Formalism,\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0trying to overcome Tribe\u2019s case. But, more recently, Michael Ramsey posted online his 13 August 2012 review of all of that,\u00a0\u201cLaurence Tribe on Textualism (and Congressional-Executive Agreements),\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0where he devotes most of his attention to the two original pro-and-con articles in the 1995\u00a0HLR<\/i>, and says that Tribe\u2019s case was far more persuasive than Ackerman-Golove\u2019s; and, then, he notes parenthetically near the end: \u201c(David Golove makes an attempt, in a reply article published at 73 N.Y.U. L.Rev. 1791 (1998), but I don\u2019t think he makes much headway against them [Tribe\u2019s \u2018points\u2019]).\u201d Golove\u2019s 152-page treatise failed to impress anyone. Among the legal scholars, it\u2019s pretty much a settled matter: Tribe was right. Not even Yoo had the temerity to challenge it.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, Yoo argued that there is a pragmatic need to uphold Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority; and that this pragmatic need (to violate the U.S. Constitution) is “that the Senate no longer has the small numbers that the Framers believed necessary for successful diplomacy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus: the current academic status of the issue is: The Supreme Court would have little choice but to overturn the Fast-Track provision of the Trade Act of 1974, if the matter were to be accepted by the Court for adjudication, unless the high Court were willing to be despised not only by the public but especially by legal scholars. If the Court were to decline to consider such a case, then it would be accepting the authority of the Executive branch in conjunction with some members of the Legislative branch, to interpret the meaning of \u201ctreaty\u201d in the U.S. Constitution \u2014 and, in the entire history of the United States, the Supreme Court has never done that.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, in a sense, that\u2019s not entirely correct: the 2001 appeals-court case,\u00a0Made in the USA Foundation v. U.S.<\/i><\/span><\/a>, was the only case to deal with this issue, and it concluded, citing as its chief authority a non-dispositive Supreme Court decision that was written by Justice William H. Rehnquist, in the 1979 case\u00a0Goldwater v. Carter<\/i><\/span><\/a>, which said that a certain action that President Jimmy Carter had done under both his treaty authority and his Commander-in-Chief authority could not be Constitutionally challenged by Senator Barry Goldwater.\u00a0But that Supreme Court decision, which some suppose to constitute authority for this trade-treaty matter, concerned not international trade, but instead the President\u2019s authority as Commander-in-Chief, and so it wasn\u2019t even a \u201ctrade\u201d case at all; it wasn\u2019t even relevant,\u00a0and thus really shouldn\u2019t have been cited, because it dealt with different Constitutional provisions regarding what does and what does not reside within the President\u2019s authority \u2014 namely, as Commander-in-Chief, and as the negotiator on mutual-defense<\/i>\u00a0treaties.<\/b>\u00a0So, there wasn\u2019t even a question in this matter as to whether it concerned a \u201ctreaty.\u201d Not relevant at all. On that shoddy basis,\u00a0the appeals court said<\/span><\/a>: \u201cWe nonetheless decline to reach the merits of this particular case,\u00a0finding that with respect to international commercial agreements such as\u00a0NAFTA, the question of just what constitutes a \u2018treaty\u2019 requiring Senate\u00a0ratification presents a nonjusticiable political question.\u201d It said this even despite denying that the meaning of the Constitutional term \u201ctreaty\u201d should be determined by the Executive and the Legislative branches, instead of by the Judicial branch:<\/span><\/p>\n

It is true that the Supreme Court has rejected arguments of\u00a0nonjusticiability with respect to other ambiguous constitutional\u00a0provisions.\u00a0In Munoz-Flores, the Court was confronted with the question of\u00a0whether a criminal statute requiring courts to impose a monetary \u201cspecial\u00a0assessment\u201d on persons convicted of federal misdemeanors was a \u201cbill for\u00a0raising revenue\u201d according to the Origination Clause of the Constitution, Art. I,\u00a0\u00a7 7, cl. 1, in spite of the lack of guidance on exactly what types of legislation\u00a0amount to bills \u201cfor raising revenue.\u201d\u00a0The Court, in electing to decide the\u00a0issue on the merits, rejected the contention that in the absence of clear\u00a0guidance in the text of the Constitution, such a determination should be\u00a0considered a political question.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, the courts must develop standards for making\u00a0<\/i>[such]\u00a0determinations, but the Government suggests no reason that developing\u00a0such standards will be more difficult in this context than in any other.\u00a0Surely a judicial system capable of determining when punishment is\u00a0\u201ccruel and unusual,\u201d when bail is \u201c[e]xcessive,\u201d when searches are\u00a0\u201cunreasonable,\u201d and when congressional action is \u201cnecessary and\u00a0proper\u201d \u00a0for executing an enumerated power, is capable of making the\u00a0more prosaic judgments demanded by adjudication of Origination\u00a0Clause challenges.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So: even that appeals court was not saying that the Legislative and Executive branches, working in concert, should determine what a \u201ctreaty\u201d is and what it isn\u2019t, but instead this court reaffirmed the exclusive authority of the Judicial branch to make such determinations. It simply refused to exercise the authority. Its argument here was:<\/span><\/p>\n

We note that none of these cases<\/i>\u00a0[the cited ones on the Supreme Court\u2019s determinations regarding the meanings of specific terms and phrases in the Constitution], however, took place directly in the context of our nation\u2019s foreign policy, and in none of them was the constitutional authority\u00a0of the President and Congress to manage our external political and economic relations implicated.\u00a0In addition to the Constitution\u2019s textual commitment of such matters\u00a0to the political branches, we believe, as discussed further below, that\u00a0in the area of foreign relations, prudential considerations militate even more strongly in favor of\u00a0judicial noninterference.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

So, why didn\u2019t those jurists even make note of the fact that their chief citation,\u00a0Goldwater v. Carter<\/i>, concerned military instead of economic matters, and not the meaning of \u201ctreaty,\u201d at all? Stupidity, or else some ulterior motive \u2014 because\u00a0no reason at all was cited by them<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their decision<\/a><\/span>\u00a0closed by saying:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We note that no member of the Senate itself has asserted that body\u2019s sole prerogative to ratify NAFTA (or, for that matter, other international commercial\u00a0agreements) by a two-thirds supermajority. In light of the Senate\u2019s apparent acquiescence in the procedures used to approve NAFTA, we believe this further\u00a0counsels against judicial intervention in the present case.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

This assertion totally ignored that \u201cthe Senate\u2019s apparent acquiescence\u201d had occurred, and been measured, only according to the 50%+1 Fast-Track standard,\u00a0never<\/i>\u00a0 according to the Constitution\u2019s two-thirds standard.\u00a0According to the Constitution\u2019s standard, which was applied nowhere in the process along the road toward approval of any of the five Fast-Tracked treaty-bills into law, the Senate never actually \u2018acquiesced in\u2019 any of them. This court was simply accepting the Constitutional validity of that \u2018acquiescence,\u2019 so as to determine whether or not it was Constitutionally valid. Circular reasoning \u2014 prejudice.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, in order to assist nullification of Fast Track for Obama\u2019s proposed \u2018trade\u2019 treaties, it would greatly help if one or more of the very vocal opponents in the U.S. Senate,\u00a0against<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0Fast-Tracking these treaties \u2014 any of\u00a0the 37 Senators who voted \u201cNay\u201d on it,<\/span><\/a>\u00a0for examples \u2014 would petition the Supreme Court to rule on the Constitutionality of the provisions in the Trade Act of 1974 (and subsequent legislation) that introduced Fast Track, and thus on Fast Track\u2019s abolition of the Constitution\u2019s two-thirds rule. The rights of each one of those 37 Senators,\u00a0and of everyone who elected them (including the present writer)<\/b>, are being violated by the Fast Track provision\u2019s denying the victory to them when they constituted 37 votes and the Constitution says that anything more than 33 votes will successfully block a treaty from becoming law. Supposedly, the 60\/40 requirement for cloture enables a mere 51\/49 vote for the treaty itself in order for the treaty to pass into law \u2014\u00a0despite the two-thirds-of-Senate rule for treaties.<\/b>\u00a0This is crazy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It could salvage American democracy, and the world (the sovereignty of each one of the participating nations), by ending U.S. participation in those treaties, and thus ending those treaties.<\/span><\/p>\n

The current plan is for Obama\u2019s TPP treaty, and either or both of the others that might also be available for U.S. signature, to be approved after this November\u2019s elections, so that voters won\u2019t be able to expel from Congress the members who do it. However, even if they get passed this way, a Supreme Court ruling against Fast Track would overturn them all (and NAFTA).<\/span><\/p>\n

Lawyers Bruce Fein and Alan Grayson have presented a separate way in which Fast Track is unConstitutional<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The likeliest way to bring the case to the Supreme Court (in order to meet the Court\u2019s stiff \u201cstanding\u201d<\/span><\/a> test for it to be able to be considered) will be in the name of petitioner(s) who concretely and demonstrably suffered severe financial damage as a consequence of NAFTA, since the enabling Act for that was the same as for Obama\u2019s proposed deals: the Trade Act of 1974. That would be the law which would be overturned, and the overturning of which would not only end NAFTA, it would block TPP, TTIP & TISA from going into effect. If this has happened to you, you may contact delphicpress@yahoo.com<\/span><\/a> in order to be considered to be (or to be included among) the named petitioner(s) on behalf of whom this case will be brought. (Though none of your losses could be recouped, your name could become prominent in history-books, because of the enormous impact this case will have if it is won.) The subject-line for that email should be: Case #5831 <\/span><\/p>\n

Whenever it happens, this will be the most important decision in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court \u2014 perhaps even more important than any President\u2019s Presidency has been. It will be a global decision, because these treaties are creating a global government, and the U.S. is central to all of them: without U.S. participation, each one of these multinational \u2018trade\u2019 treaties will end. If all three of Obama\u2019s mega-\u2018trade\u2019 deals (TPP, TTIP, and TISA) become law and stay, then the participating democracies will become so hamstrung by international corporations, there won\u2019t be any real democracy remaining; and, for example, the increases in CO2 regulations that have been \u2018agreed\u2019 in the recent Paris accord to limit global warming, will be blocked \u2014 the planet will cook uncontrollably. Opponents of \u201cregulation\u201d might think that that would be worth the enormous harms \u2014 to the environment, to workers\u2019 rights, to product-safety, and all the rest that would be crippled by these treaties \u2014 but even many opponents of \u201cregulation\u201d favor democracy, and favor the sovereignty of nations. Only the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in the major international corporations would have any authentic reason to be happy, though their own descendants might end up sharing the hell of an incinerating planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide whether the term \u201ctreaty\u201d in the U.S. Constitution means \u201cinternational agreement,\u201d and whether \u201cinternational agreement\u201d means \u201ctreaty.\u201d If they rule that those two are not synonymous, then the U.S. Constitution will be dead \u2014 in the sense that it will then be gone.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse NAFTA and other mega-\u2018trade\u2019 deals are actually about lots more than merely\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019; they\u2019re about sovereignty\u00a0\u2014 the ability of each of the participating nations to establish laws and regulations restricting toxicity of products, environmental pollution, protecting workers\u2019 rights, and many other things that are essential to the public’s welfare. These\u00a0\u2018trade\u2019 deals lock-in existing laws […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":233126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-233125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}