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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 2 January 2001 | Vol. II No.1 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 2 January 2001 | Vol. II No.1 | ||
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"This decision will not stand,"
The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Jesse Helms (Republican-North Carolina), came out in strong opposition to President Clinton's signature on the International Criminal Court Treaty on New Year's Eve, just after it was announced at the White House the afternoon of December 31.
Following is the complete text of the Helms statement:
"President Clinton's decision to sign the Rome treaty establishing an International Criminal Court in his final days in office is as outrageous as it is inexplicable.
"Two years ago, the President refused to sign the Rome Treaty, citing the threat the Court posed to American service members and officials. At the time, his chief negotiator David Scheffer told Congress: 'The (Rome) treaty purports to establish an arragement whereby United States armed forces operating overseas could be conceivably prosecuted by the International Criminal Court even if the United States has not agreed to be bound by the treaty. Not only is this contrary to the most fundamental principles of treaty law, it could inhibit the ability of the United States to use its military to meet alliance obligations and participate in multinational operations...'
"Nothing - I repeat, nothing - has changed since then to justify U.S. signature. To the contrary, for two years, the Administration has tried in vain to secure additional protections for American citizens, but was rebuffed at every turn by our so-called allies. The Court still claims today, as it did two years ago, the jurisdiction to indict, try and imprison American citizens, whether or not the U.S. agrees to be bound by the treaty. By signing, the President has effectively given his approval to this unprecedented assault on American sovereignty.
"Today's action is a blatant attempt by a lame-duck President to tie the hands of his successor. Well, I have a message for the outgoing President: This decision will not stand.
"I will make reversing this decision, and protecting America's fighting men and women from the jurisdiction of this international kangaroo court, one of my highest priorities in the new Congress.
"Earlier this year, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (Republican-Virginia) and I introduced the American Service Members' Protection Act, along with most of the Republican leadership and relevant committee chairmen in both houses of Congress. Our effort was publicly endorsed last month by a bipartisan group of former senior U.S. officials, including, among others, Bush Defense Secretary-designate Don Rumsfeld.
"Come January 20th, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will work with Senator Warner, Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the incoming Bush Administration to deal decisively with the threat posed by this Court, and to ensure once and for all that no American is ever tried by this global star chamber."
TCN Comment – We are with you Senator Helms! If your accomplices had any backbone you would have stopped Clinton's authority to sign treaties when you had the chance. (Remember the phony impeachment trial?) Now you end up in a "management by crisis" situation as a result of your inaction at that time.
The Clinton/Gore administration is now and always has been set on the destruction of the US as a military force to be reckoned with. This is just another move consistent with that objective.
While your are blocking this treaty, please back out the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification that was ratified by the U.S. Senate on October 18 without even the name of the treaty being read! Maybe the Clinton/Gore crime team was able to slip it past you, but you need to admit your lack of attention and correct your mistake.
It is never too late to do the right thing.
When former senator Dan Coats met alone with President-elect George W. Bush in a Washington hotel room early last week to discuss Coats being secretary of Defense, the Indiana conservative made clear that he wanted to roll back what he calls the "social experimentation" within the military, Newsweek reports in the latest issue.
Coats wanted to rescind accommodations made to gays and women -- what Coats described as "the feminization of the military."
Bush recoiled, eager to avoid the fractious struggles over military policy that plagued the opening days of President Clinton's administration.
The lack of big thinkers -- and big mouths -- among Bush's nominees has not gone unnoticed, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and National Security Correspondent John Barry report in the January 8 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, January 1).
Disappointed backers of one brainy candidate for the top Pentagon job, Paul Wolfowitz, grumbled about "NINA" (No Intellectuals Need Apply). As for Bush's ultimate Pentagon choice, Donald Rumsfeld, he still adheres to 'Rumsfeld's Rules," which he promulgated during his last stint as Defense Secretary 25 years ago.
Among them: "Nothing in Washington is off the record." And: "Don't accept [a top White House job] or stay unless you have an understanding with the president that you're free to tell him what you think 'with the bark off' and you have the courage to do it."
[ PRNewswire ]
"There is a principle to be vindicated. And that principle is that no person is above the law, even the President of the United States. That is what we have been charged with doing."
— Independent Counsel Robert Ray
"I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level, because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money."
— Dallas NAACP president Lee Alcorn on Al Gore's selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, to be his vice presidential running mate.
"The independent counsel concludes that Mrs. Clinton's sworn testimony that she had no input into [presidential aide David] Watkins' decision or role in the travel-office firings is factually inaccurate."
— Independent Counsel Robert Ray's official assessment of the credibility of Hillary Rodham Clinton's testimony under oath.
"I do not think this was a coincidence. I do not think our number just came up."
— Juanita Broaddrick, a nursing-home owner who claimed that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, commenting on the IRS audits befalling her and two other women, who also say Mr. Clinton made sexual advances toward them.
"Well, then, how come he didn't win?"
— George W. Bush, questioning a reporter who had just told him that John McCain, his principal opponent in the Republican primaries, had generated record turnout in the primaries.
"He was the guy who helped me study for my third-grade state-capital quiz. Seattle — I got it down."
— Kristin Gore, unaware that the capital of Washington is actually Olympia, praising her father, Vice President Al Gore, for his intellectual help.
"Thank you for your e-mail. This Internet of yours is a wonderful invention."
— George W. Bush, responding to Al Gore's offer to forgo general-election campaign advertising financed by soft money.
"I've been a part of the discussions on the strategic reserve since the days when it was first established."
— Al Gore commenting on his integral part in the creation of the reserve, notwithstanding the fact that President Ford established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve when he signed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act Dec. 22, 1975 — two years before Al Gore became a congressman.
"Today, it is the case that many Americans seem unsure whether violations of oaths to family, to country and Constitution, and to God are serious matters. They aren't sure if character -- if truth-telling -- in our leaders matters." --William Bennett
By Rep. Ron Paul
Throughout the presidential election controversy, we have been bombarded with references to our sacred "democracy." Television and radio shows have been inundated with politicians worried about the "will of the people" being thwarted by the courts. Solemn warnings have been issued concerning the legitimacy of the presidency and the effects on our "democratic system" if the eventual winner did not receive the most popular votes. "I'm really in love with our democracy," one presidential candidate gushed to a reporter. Apparently, the United States at some point become a stealth democracy at the behest of news directors and politicians.
The problem, of course, is that our country is not a democracy. Our nation was founded as a constitutionally limited republic, as any grammar school child knew just a few decades ago (remember the Pledge of Allegiance: "and to the Republic for which it stands"...?). The Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, not democracy. In fact, the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. On the contrary, Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution is quite clear: "The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government (emphasis added). The emphasis on democracy in our modern political discourse has no historical or constitutional basis.
In fact, the Constitution is replete with undemocratic mechanisms. The electoral college is an obvious example. Small states are represented in national elections with greater electoral power than their populations would warrant in a purely democratic system. Similarly, sparsely populated Wyoming has the same number of senators as heavily populated New York. The result is not democratic, but the Founders knew that smaller states had to be protected against overreaching federal power. The Bill of Rights provides individuals with similar protections against the majority. The First Amendment, for example, is utterly undemocratic. It was designed to protect unpopular speech against democratic fervor. Would the same politicians so enamored with democracy be willing to give up freedom of speech if the majority chose to do so?
Our Founders instituted a republican system to protect individual rights and property rights from tyranny, regardless of whether the tyrant was a king, a monarchy, a congress, or an unelected mob. They believed that a representative government, restrained by the Bill of Rights and divided into three power sharing branches, would balance the competing interests of the population. They also knew that unbridled democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny suffered by the colonies under King George. In other words, the Founders had no illusions about democracy. Democracy represented unlimited rule by an omnipotent majority, while a constitutionally limited republic was seen as the best system to preserve liberty. Inalienable individual liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights would be threatened by the "excesses of democracy."
Last week I introduced a resolution in Congress which reaffirms our nation's republican form of government. H.Con Res 443 serves as a response to recent calls for the abolition of the electoral college. The collectivist liberals want popular national elections (rather than the electoral college system) because they know their constituencies are concentrated in certain heavily populated states. They want to nullify the voting power of the smaller, pro-liberty states. Supporters of my resolution in Congress can send a strong message that every state still matters, and that liberty is more important than shifting majority sentiment.
[ Rep Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk ]
By Chuck Baldwin
I use the term Freedom Lovers intentionally. The word "conservative" or even the word "Christian" is far too vague and indefinite. In today's lexicon, Bill Clinton is said to personify the term Christian and Colin Powell is hailed as a conservative. Yet, both men betray the substance of the accolades heaped upon them. It's to the point that the terms conservative or liberal seem to share more in common than most care to admit.
Liberals will steal one's freedom in the name of welfare or entitlement programs, while conservatives will steal one's freedom in the name of law enforcement or free trade. The result is the same: Americans continue to lose their liberties.
What Nazism and Communism could not do through acts of war and conquest, both major political parties in America are doing through acts of congress, court rulings and executive orders: putting the shackles of bondage on the American people. And the unfathomable part to the story is the fact that, on the whole, the America people don't seem to mind.
Of course, there are those who do mind. There are those who yet regard individual liberty (as described and defined in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights) as worth fighting and dying for. Their lot may not be large, but it is principled and determined. What does a new century hold in store for them?
Sooner or later, lovers of freedom will have to make the same kinds of choices that yesterday's lovers of freedom had to make. It appears inevitable. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have the courage or fortitude to make the hard political decisions necessary to return America to the founding principles of limited government, states rights, and individual liberty. (It may be questioned how many of them even understand those principles?)
Only the rise of a potent and principled third party can avert the hard decisions to come. And since this seems remote, it would appear that, like our ancestors, Freedom Lovers would have to choose from the following:
We can choose the option made by our Pilgrim Fathers and relocate. Or, we can choose the option made by our Revolutionary brothers and separate. The only other option is to live in subjugation, which to Freedom Lovers is not an option at all. The unknown factor is how many Freedom Lovers will be left when it becomes necessary to make the hard choices described above?
A few months ago, a friend of mine (who was recently elected to public office) gave me a wonderful history book. On the inside cover he wrote, "To Chuck, A Patriot and Friend. Sometimes I think you were born 200 years too late." Or, at age 48, maybe 50 years too early. [ http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com ]
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