Another example of how the American ruling elite, endeavoring to break free from the constraints of national loyalty, is rendering citizenship pointless is in the area of foreign policy. In the American system, the President is tasked with negotiating treaties1. For those treaties to become law, they must be ratified by the Senate. In contract law, this is the same as a deal requiring board approval. The executives can sign what they like, but the contract is not enforceable until it is approved by the board.
The Founders recognized the dangers of giving the President sole discretion in treaty making. He could use this power to circumvent the power of the legislature by striking deals with other countries that trumped US law. Imagine Obama striking a deal with Mexico, giving Texas back, so their votes would not count in the next election.
It has always been a quarrelsome process and intentionally so. Treaties are the most important and dangerous activities performed by government. They start wars, end wars, start economies and end economies. They are not to be taken lightly so the American system has high hurdles built into the process. Presidents hate this, but they hate a lot of things that are safeguards against mischief.
The emerging Iran deal is revealing how the Obama administration is plotting to circumvent Congress and avoid submitting the matter to the Senate.
Major world powers have begun talks about a United Nations Security Council resolution to lift U.N. sanctions on Iran if a nuclear agreement is struck with Tehran, a step that could make it harder for the U.S. Congress to undo a deal, Western officials said.
The talks between Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — the five permanent members of the Security Council — plus Germany and Iran, are taking place ahead of difficult negotiations that resume next week over constricting Iran’s nuclear ability.
Some eight U.N. resolutions – four of them imposing sanctions – ban Iran from uranium enrichment and other sensitive atomic work and bar it from buying and selling atomic technology and anything linked to ballistic missiles. There is also a U.N. arms embargo.
Iran sees their removal as crucial as U.N. measures are a legal basis for more stringent U.S. and European Union measures to be enforced. The U.S. and EU often cite violations of the U.N. ban on enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work as justification for imposing additional penalties on Iran.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress on Wednesday that an Iran nuclear deal would not be legally binding, meaning future U.S. presidents could decide not to implement it. That point was emphasized in an open letter by 47 Republican senators sent on Monday to Iran’s leaders asserting any deal could be discarded once President Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.
But a Security Council resolution on a nuclear deal with Iran could be legally binding, say Western diplomatic officials. That could complicate and possibly undercut future attempts by Republicans in Washington to unravel an agreement.
Now, the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that international law does not trump US law. That’s not an issue here. The issue here is that Obama is trying avoid the whole treaty process by getting the UN Security Council to order its member nations to abide by this deal. Failure to do so would, technically, be a violation of the UN Charter. The fact that Iran, for example, has been in violation of the UN Charter for decades, as are other nations, is not important.
What Obama is attempting to do is shift the focus from the law, which is against him, to a future political fight waged by the next president. If Jeb Bush rejects this deal, for example, he would have the added problem of dealing with the UN and, presumably, US allies. Even though he would be well within the law, the politics of taking on the UN would complicate things.
In the near term Obama would argue that the failure of the Senate to approve his deal with Iran is putting the US at odds with the “international community.” The word “community” is a magic word on the Left so that means all the left-wingers in the American media will be out in the streets ululating about how Republicans are committing treason.
It won’t result in approval, but it lets Obama and future presidents avoid compliance with the law in future treaty deals. Instead of going to Congress, they will go to the UN, giving France more say in these matters than the American people.
As we see with open borders, the end game is about rupturing the ties between the rulers and the ruled. In a nation, the rulers have a natural loyalty to their host nation and its people. Their success is the nation’s success. Citizenship, therefore, has value. Being an American, even if you were a field hand or factory laborer, had benefits just for being an American citizen.
In the post-national system our rulers are ushering in, citizenship has no value. Your elected representatives have no power as Congress (or parliament) becomes ornamental. The laws offer preferences to those that are not legal citizens in areas of employment and welfare benefits. Being a legal citizen becomes a sucker’s play. Once the people figure it out, the ruling classes are free to drop all pretense of loyalty to nation and citizenship.
The next phase is a world of cloud people, untethered from the ground below them. Like medieval lords, they extract rents to finance their lavish lifestyles, but unlike those lords they will have no sense of obligation to their subjects. In Brazil, the elite live in the hills, guarded by private armies. The rest are left to their own devices. What services provided by the elites are to mitigate against unrest.
The administrative class of the managerial elite will function as game keepers, making sure the people are fed and given minimal care. They will try to suppress violence and crime, but their main duty will be keeping the people in their pens.
Whether this will work is debatable. So far, human organization has been about scaling up the kin-tribe. The post-national cloud people look more like colonizers, which eventually ends with one side swinging from a noose. But, there was a time when no one thought a country could work.
1I Know that technically the Senate simply permits the President to ratify the treaty as part of its advice and consent authority.
The main operating principle of our politics has become “destroying the village to save it”. No constraint is too sacrosanct it can’t be bulldozed in the name of “giving the people what we think they need”. Or in the words of Mencken, the citizenry is going to get it good and hard.
How about for starters we kick the UN out of our country and stop giving tax dollars to them? F the UN. We don’t need them. We are supposed to kowtow to a bunch of third world despots, half of which are Moslems? In the end, with a president who is NOT the current Emperor, and hopefully there will not be a Emperor II, we can just tell the UN to sit and spin. What are they going to do?
Duck, I have been known use my literary license for effect. I just glad my quack readers are paying attention.
In fact is the poor who live in hills in Brazil, they’re called “morros”, the elites live in the center of the cities but they also have beach houses, one thing that is common among Latin-American elites is that they all have mansions in Miami.
Interesting points you make, and to some degree echoed here by my own nation’s slavish desire to follow European dictatorship. Parliament is basically redundant and devolves into a talking shop for trivia: whatever is decided in Westminster is small beer because the trump cards dealt by some fat Belgian while being pleasured by Germans in Strasbourg will always win. Gordon Brown (the economic disaster as Prime Minister who can’t be bothered now even attending the House of Commons as his town’s MP because he is too busy rushing off to give speeches in far-flung places about how good he was at economics) said Britain would become like North Korea if it left the EU. Amazing stuff.
Anyhow, I was alerted by your theme and your sentence : “Citizenship, therefore, has value.”
The way things are, the elite have already shown they do not value citizenship in the west because it is freely given (or the financial benefits of it) to people who have no right to be called citizens. They certainly don’t have any great enthusiasm for their new home nation. This in time will impact on the armed forces and consequently a country’s ability to defend itself. In the UK we have the tribes arriving and being more excited about fighting in some Middle Eastern ruined town that defending their new, ‘welcome-and-here’s-free-cash’ world.
They like guns and RPGs but are not so keen on wearing an army uniform.
My point is that citizenship is being routinely downgraded. Who needs citizens when no one at the top cares? Eventually there will be no citizens with loyalties left. Here the BBC describes teenage females who fly out to be screwed in the desert by murderous barbarians, as ‘British’ They aren’t by any stretch of the imagination, but they have a passport with a meaningless coat of arms on the front. In time there will just be people who may pay taxes and who may vote as directed, but they will only be tolerated because they perform some minor economic function. The police, who will be prevented from checking crime, will be there to enforce Facebook terms and conditions and guard against the heinous sin of saying boo to a goose.
So… Boo!