Bolton and Yoo Argue for a Restoration of the Senate’s Treaty Power

If you’re like me, you probably believe our nation’s treaties with foreign governments must be approved by a 2/3 vote of the Senate.  After all, that’s what it says in the Constitution:

“[The President] shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; . . .” (Article II, Section 2).

There are ways presidents can get around this requirement, and John Bolton (former U.N. ambassador) and John Yoo argue in the New York Times these practices should be brought to an end.  I tend to agree.  What good is a constitution if no one reads it?  But I wonder if Bolton & Yoo are motivated purely by constitutional concerns:

Candidate Obama promised to “re-engage” and “work constructively within” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate?

Draconian restrictions on energy use would follow. A majority of the Congress would be much easier for Mr. Obama to get than a supermajority of the Senate. A scholar at the Brookings Institution has already proposed that a new president overcome objections to this environmentalists’ holy grail by evading the Treaty Clause.

This sounds like standard conservative whining over global warming.  But Bolton and Yoo make at least one good point:

By insisting on the proper constitutional process for treaty-making, Republicans can join Mr. Obama in advancing a bipartisan foreign policy. They can also help strike the proper balance between the legislative and executive branches that so many have called for in recent years.

At PoliBlog, Steven Taylor responds to Bolton & Yoo’s call for executive restraint:

This is, of course, remarkable to anyone who has been paying attention for the last seven-plus years, as Woo and Bolton both have been major proponents of the unfettered expansion of executive power in regards to foreign policy. Now the new administration hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and they are rediscovering that the Congress has constitutional prerogatives in this arena.

Even better, they conclude their piece by calling for Republicans to “join Mr. Obama in advancing a bipartisan foreign policy.” Yes, you read that right, Bolton and Yoo are calling for a bipartisan foreign policy. Many things come to mind in regards to this, but specifically it takes me back to Bolton’s recess appointment to be UN Ambassador and the fight with the Senate over his confirmation when Bush re-appointed him. There was no bipartisanship there, nor was there a lot of extolling of the Senate’s role in foreign policy. Instead, there was a lot of vitriol and political wrangling about how the Senate Democrats were taking away the president’s powers (see, for example, here, here and here).

Bush Administration: Vacation Homes More Important than Forests

Matt Corely at Think Progress writes about the efforts of Mark E. Rey to push through last-minute rules changes that would allow millions of acres of U.S. forest land to be converted to vacation homes.

From the Washington Post:

Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, last week signaled his intent to formalize the controversial change before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama. As a candidate, Obama campaigned against the measure in Montana, where local governments complained of being blindsided by Rey’s negotiating the policy shift behind closed doors with the nation’s largest private landowner.

The shift is technical but with large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads passing through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.

But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company’s 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.

Writes Corely:

Throughout his tenure heading the Forest Service, Rey has regularly tried to avoid public scrutiny of his anti-environmental policies, such as when he “waited until late on December 23, 2003 to announce the removal of roadless protections to allow logging” in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. When Rey testified before the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health in 2001, he said that wanted the Forest Service to be able to “use categorical exclusions more often” because he believed that environmental assessments wasted “the time of resource managers and taxpayer dollars.”

My take: This is absurd.  We have millions of homeless people in the United States, no small number of them veterans of our military.  We also have quickly-shrinking natural resources, timber being one of our most precious assets.  And now comes Rey, working under cover of political darkness to convert woodlands to vacation homes for wealthy people who apparently don’t have enough room in the homes they already own.  What does this say about our nation’s priorities?

Update: Plum Creek Timber has backed out of the deal.