Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, May 12, 2004

At a committee hearing, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said he was “perplexed” as to why the Senate leadership had yet to schedule a vote on a treaty he claimed was “directly related to our national security.”

Critics have argued the treaty, among other things, works against American security, not for it.

As NewsMax has reported, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., held two hearings in October wherein only the treaty's supporters were called to testify. On a voice vote, he rammed the aptly named LOST through his committee before skeptics or opponents were aware of what was going on.

When Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., along with NewsMax.com and other conservative media outlets, blew the whistle, that ploy of trying to get the document through on a voice vote on the floor when no one was looking crashed in flames.

Lugar, by the way, submitted to the House panel his written comments made earlier this month at the Brookings Institution in support of LOST.

Now Congressman Lantos wants to push the president to pressure Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to defy his party’s conservative base in an election year.

Politically, this is an easy one for Lantos. As a loyal Democrat, he supports Sen. John Kerry's campaign and wants Bush out of the White House anyway, so he has nothing to lose by trying to force a wedge between the president and his supporters.

The president is known to be less than enthusiastic about LOST anyway, so if he doesn’t do the congressman’s bidding, the West Coast Democrat can go back to fulminating, as he did in Wednesday’s hearing against those “who fundamentally distrust multilateralism in all its manifestations, and who have fought against every international treaty,” and take a shot at Bush for not strong-arming Frist into action.

Not that Frist is easily strong-armed. NewsMax has been told by a knowledgeable Senate source that with the heavy schedule this year in a Senate whose Democrat minority has developed obstruction into an art form, getting the treaty to the floor this year would be difficult.

It would not be surprising if President Bush would give a higher priority to such stalled projects in the Senate as renewal of welfare reform, a comprehensive energy bill, making his tax cuts permanent, and of course giving several of his judicial nominees an up or down vote.

At Wednesday’s hearing, advocates of the Law of the Sea Treaty, led by State Department legal adviser William Howard Taft IV and Adm. Michael G. Mullen, vice chief of naval operations, argued the pact would preserve our freedom of navigation, help counter excessive maritime claims, preserve our intelligence activities and position us to influence future developments.

Taft said that LOST “accords the coastal state sovereign rights over living maritime resources” and establishes a dispute settlement system to “promote compliance with its provisions and the peaceful settlement of disputes.”

Their arguments ran into a buzzsaw of strong skepticism from such committee members as Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and Ron Paul, R-Texas.

Tancredo noted that the “compulsory dispute process” could involve erosion of our sovereignty if a block of anti-American nations were to force the United States to take action against its best interests. “I’m not comfortable with that,” he said.

Congressman Paul, perhaps the ultimate skeptic of “entangling alliances” on Capitol Hill, asked Taft if a treaty were “the supreme law of the land?”

“That’s what the Constitution says,” the State Department's counsel replied.

The Texan followed that up with the observation that some treaties seem to ensnare us into amending our Constitution. He cited agreements such as those dealing with trade and immigration.

Paul expressed concern that LOST would create an international entity that could impose a tax on Americans, with no vote from the American people.

The U.S. is careless in passing treaties with little concern that they can later “stir up a hornets' nest” for our future security, Paul observed.

“We may not see the danger now,” Rep. Paul said. “But suppose someday, our power and influence in the world diminishes and China sets up a naval presence in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay?”

Mullen responded that having spent most of his life at sea, he believed U.S. interests were better served by a treaty.

'World Government'

Witnesses opposed to LOST included Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP); Baker Spring, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation; and Dr. Peter Leitner, who was on the ground floor in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan rejected the pact.

Gaffney allowed as how some provisions of LOST might be harmless or perhaps even of some benefit. On balance, however, he insisted the treaty would be a net minus for the United States.

Gaffney, an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan administration, told the lawmakers that despite amendments in the Clinton administration, the defective parts of the treaty to which Reagan objected “in important respects still apply today.”

The “ill-concealed hostility of an overwhelming majority of the participating nations to American economic and military power” could use agreements such as LOST “as part of a Lilliputian-like strategy to constrain our sovereignty and strength to redistribute the industrial world’s wealth, and ours, to undeveloped states,” he said.

“For the first time in history,” Gaffney said, “we are being asked to submit to a supranational agency that has all the trappings of a world government: an executive, legislative assembly, a court, the ability to raise revenues [impose taxes], and of course the means to enforce its decisions.”

The Center for Security Policy's CEO openly urged venerable Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., to join the opposition to the pact.

Congressman Hyde is noncommittal. But he appears to believe that the burden of proof lies with the treaty's advocates.

Committee sources indicated to NewsMax.com that, even though ratification of the treaty is the exclusive prerogative of the Senate, the chairman is not conducting this hearing as an academic exercise. The House would have to be involved in “enabling legislation” to make it fully effective.

Editor's note: