Come Thursday, the future of the United States Senate will begin to take shape. On that day, the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee will begin the first of two days of hearings on the ratification of one of the most momentous international agreements in memory: the United Nation’s Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).
If all goes according to the proponents’ plan, few Senators will have any idea what LOST entails before they are asked to vote for it. The working assumption is that many legislators will be inclined to do in this case what the Senate has done too often in the past with respect to arms control and many other, complex multinational accords: fail to read the text; forego serious deliberation, let alone debate, about it; and rubber-stamp its approval in a matter of days, if not hours.
At the moment, the Treaty’s supporters expect to secure far more than the needed two-thirds vote required by the Framers. Senators are encouraged not to spend precious time worrying about an accord that the United States Navy strenuously supports, the Bush Administration wants promptly ratified, various mining and energy interests and environmental groups (however implausibly) agree is desirable and the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approved a couple of years ago.
... so why worry?
LOST was designed three decades ago by the Soviet Union and its so-called “non-aligned” allies to foster supranational entities at the expense of nation states, particularly those with representative governments. The Senate of the United States would be as irrelevant to that sort of world order as national parliaments in Europe have already become, thanks to the transfer of virtually all rule-making authority to the European Union’s bureaucrats in Brussels.
The piece of the world in question starts with its oceans, which the Treaty calls an “international commons” and part of “the common heritage of mankind.” The immediate focus of the socialist, redistributionist agenda shared by many of LOST’s principal architects is evident in the mandate given to the organization charged with exercising control over the seas and the resources that lie beneath them. It entails, among other things, ensuring the just and equitable dispersal of the wealth of the seabeds to the world’s developing and land-locked nations.
Make no mistake, though. The seas are only the starting point. For one thing, the internal waters and even land masses are claimed as within the jurisdiction of LOST agencies since what emerges from them in the air and water inevitably affects the “marine environment.”
In addition, the UN and its anti-American majorities are keen to establish similar arrangements with respect to other so-called “international commons,” such as Outer Space and the Internet. They seek to institutionalize “self-financing” arrangements (read, international taxes) that will allow supranational organizations to become even less transparent and accountable. They are determined to impose rule-making authority over national governments, including U.S. Senators.
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