On August 13, local CBS affiliate 8 News Now asked Nevada Republican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle if she still supported an earlier-stated position to withdraw from the United Nations. Angle, who hopes to defeat Democratic Senator Harry Reid in November, replied: “The United Nations resides on our soil and costs us money. We are — I don’t see any place in the Constitution with those priorities about the United Nations. So when we start talking about cutting programs, 5-percent per year, I think the United Nations fits into that category, yes.”
Zac Petankas, the deputy communications director for the Reid campaign, quickly responded to Angle’s call for withdrawal: “Sharron Angle’s extreme and dangerous agenda includes foreign policy ideas that even top Republicans say are crazy. Republican Senator Richard Lugar rejected Angle’s ideas as ‘very extreme views.’”
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Although Senators Reid and Lugar may refer to Angle’s UN position as “extreme,” how extreme is that position when lined up with that of other well-known political icons? If Angle is elected the junior U.S. Senator from Nevada, she won’t be the first Senator to take such a position. In 1945 when the U.S. Senate voted for the United Nations Participation Act, Senator William Langer (N.D.) stated his opposition to the bill, as follows:
[Because the UN would be given authority] to send our boys all over the earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people, and to American institutions.
Langer was one of two Senators to vote against the United Nations Participation Act. Several decades later, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) carried on the torch, also advocating for U.S. withdrawal. In a statement delivered on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Goldwater said:
The time has come to recognize the United Nations for the anti-American, anti-freedom organization that it has become. The time has come for us to cut off all financial help, withdraw as a member, and ask the United Nations to find headquarters location outside the United States that is more in keeping with the philosophy of the majority of voting members, someplace like Moscow or Peking.
Goldwater made those remarks after the Republic of China (Taiwan) was removed from the UN Security Council and membership as a whole and replaced by Communist China. Upset at this betrayal of freedom, Senator Goldwater called the United Nations an “anti-American, anti-freedom organization.” The anti-UN sentiments continue to hold a place in Washington, as every congressional term Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) reintroduced the American Sovereignty Restoration Act (H.R. 1146) to withdraw the United States from the United Natons. Throughout the 2007 and 2008 Republican primary campaign, Rep. Paul was quite vocal of his disapproval of the UN, calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal.
In his recent CPAC speech, delivered on February 19, 2010, Paul received his loudest applause after he stated, “It’s the conservative position to not even belong to the United Nations.”
Congressman Ron Paul first introduced a bill to withdraw from the United Nations on September 19, 1983, 18 days after Congressman Larry McDonald, a vocal critic of the UN, was lost at sea aboard KAL Flight 007, the Korean passenger airliner shot down by the Soviet Union. Paul introduced the bill, then known as the United Nations Termination Act (H.R. 3891), in honor of his friend Rep. McDonald, who had previously introduced the same legislation, which Paul had co-sponsored.
In his book We Hold These Truths (1976), McDonald wrote, “Our participation in multi-nation pacts, such as the NATO agreement and the UN Charter, should be formally terminated.”
Now, Sharron Angle wants to take up the torch carried by Ron Paul and Larry McDonald into the U.S. Senate, but she isn´t the only U.S. Senate candidate with this position. In Kentucky, U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul has taken the following position on the United Nations: “Moreover, I believe that the United States should withdraw from and stop funding altogether those U.N. programs that undermine legitimate American interests and harm the cause of freedom around the world,” according to his campaign website.
The Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate candidates Rand Paul and Sharron Angle have not backed away from their calls to restoring America’s sovereignty and independence, as advocated by George Washington and other Founding Fathers who warned against entangling alliances.
Photo of Sharron Angle: AP Images
