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President Bush Wants Law of the Sea Treaty Ratified John
F. McManus President Bush has already suffered substantial loss of support from the GOP faithful because he has presided over enormous budgets, racked up huge deficits, delivered little or no action to seal our southern border, doggedly continued the Iraq war, and much more. He is now certain to incur additional erosion of support because he has formally asked the Senate to ratify the UN's dangerous Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). Leftists and internationalists have tried to entangle the United States into this dangerous pact for close to three decades. Their plan ran into stiff opposition from President Reagan in the mid-1980s and it ended up back on the shelf. The treaty then reemerged when Indiana's internationalist Senator Richard Lugar bucked the prevailing view of his GOP colleagues and tried to get it ratified in 2004. Then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) took care of torpedoing it on that occasion. Overwhelmingly, Republicans have opposed the pact claiming it would compromise U.S. sovereignty. With clear evidence to back them up, critics claim that LOST would place the oceans (70 percent of the earth's surface) under UN control. They point to the distinct possibility that it would enable the UN to gain partial financial independence because the world body would gain the ability to "tax" companies seeking to gather products from the oceans. The UN has always sought any kind of financial independence that would make it less responsive to member nations.
LOST would also establish the International Seabed Authority, a new UN bureaucracy with power to regulate fishing, drilling for energy, and mining beyond 12 miles from any coastline. This new UN agency would have power to spawn its own court to settle whatever disputes might arise. Unlike membership in the UN Security Council where the U.S. has veto power, our nation would possess merely one vote as a member of LOST. Added to all these concerns are the claims of the pact's supporters that it would prohibit U.S. Navy's submarines, and those of other nations, from patrolling the oceans. The late Elisabeth Borgese, who passed away in 2002, is justly credited by treaty enthusiasts as the prime mover behind LOST. An admirer of Karl Marx, she had regularly championed the UN's call for "sustainable development," a thinly disguised term for international socialism. Her hope expressed in a 1999 speech that LOST would lead to a "new world order" exposed her internationalist view even further. The U.S. Constitution states that treaty ratification requires approval by "two-thirds of the Senators present." All senators should be urged to vote against Mr. Bush's request. And all Americans should be aware that the President's promotion of LOST provides additional evidence that he has abandoned any claim to be either a conservative or a constitutionalist. ---------------------------------------------------
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