Politics, the saying goes, makes strange bedfellows. In presidential politics, the cozy compromises with the unconstitutional seem even more unsettling.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a man whose personal popularity and political fortunes have increased in direct proportion to his spreading of his libertarian-leaning ideals, has now publicly embraced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an unprecedented sovereignty surrender masquerading as a multi-national trade pact.
Paul’s speech coincided with the TPP ministerial meeting conducted October 19-24 in Sydney, Australia.
Speaking at the Center for the National Interest dinner in New York City on October 23, Senator Paul said:
Our national power is a function of the national economy. During the Reagan renaissance, our strength in the world reflected our successful economy.
Low growth, high unemployment, and big deficits have undercut our influence in the world. Americans have suffered real consequences from a weak economy.
President George W. Bush understood that part of the projection of American power is the exporting of American goods and culture. His administration successfully brokered fourteen new free trade agreements and negotiated three others that are the only new free trade agreements approved since President Obama took office. Instead of just talking about a so-called “pivot to Asia,” the Obama administration should prioritize negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership by year’s end.
Why would Rand Paul, a man who has in the past demonstrated a remarkable adherence to the principles of the Constitution, make his own “pivot” away from those doctrines and toward a pact as pernicious as the TPP? Perhaps the answer is found in this paragraph from a story on Paul’s speech printed in The Diplomat: “As a Republican presidential hopeful, Paul likely recognizes that his and the party’s interests are best served by trying to find some issues on which Republicans can cooperate with the administration. This would give the American electorate confidence that the Republican Party is interested in governing, and would make it harder for Democrats to use disgust with the Republican Party to mobilize the Democratic base in the 2016 election.”
With the exception of Paul’s father, former congressman Ron Paul, it seems that when constitutionalists begin to crave the chair in the Oval Office, their fidelity to the principles of republicanism is swapped in exchange for approval by the principals of the Republicans.
If Senator Paul’s purpose in pushing for the quick passage of the TPP is to draw so close to the Democrats that they can’t stab him, then he’s probably picked the wrong issue. As The New American has repeatedly reported over the last couple of years, Democrats in Congress have been pumping the brakes on negotiations of the TPP, worried that a significant bloc of their base would leave the party should the agreement be approved before the November elections.
During a recent round of TPP negotiations held in Ottawa, it was reported that members of President Obama’s own party were pressuring him to slow progress on the pact until after the November 4 elections for fear that environmental activists and labor unions who traditionally support Democrats would abandon the party over their opposition to the controversial 12-nation trade deal.
The article in The Diplomat noted this incongruity as well, reporting:
Indeed, as The Diplomat has previously noted, opposition to new trade deals has been strongest among Obama’s own party. For example, in March 2013 nearly 20 percent of the Democratic House caucus wrote a letter to President Obama expressing their opposition to Japan joining the TPP talks. Then, in November of last year, 151 House Democrats — about 80 percent of the entire caucus — wrote to the president to express their opposition to giving him fast track authority, which many experts and the president himself see as vital to getting the eventual trade deal through Congress.
Of course, most of the foregoing analysis focuses on the political considerations that may or may not have influenced Senator Paul’s decision to encourage the acceleration of the conclusion of the TPP negotiations and subsequent consent of the Senate. More important than that, however, are the manifold crimes against the Constitution committed by the TPP.
Republicans, Democrats, and Americans of all political persuasions need to understand particulars of the TPP that threaten not only the economic vitality of the United States (contrary to the claims of Senator Paul in his speech), but the fundamental principles of elective government, as well.
In November 2013, portions of the TPP draft agreement published by WikiLeaks contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals.
Another WikiLeaks disclosure in January 2014 revealed that the president was attempting to surrender sovereignty over U.S. environmental policy to international bureaucrats interested in lowering those standards to mirror those of our TPP partner nations. Naturally, the green lobby criticized this concession, organizing demonstrations opposing the agreement.
U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and web-based publishing would also be obliterated by the TPP, and, although it hasn’t been widely reported, the TPP would give the global government sweeping surveillance powers, as well.
Although the American people (and the people of all nations involved in the pact) are prevented from seeing or commenting on the treaty being ostensibly negotiated on their behalf, multinational corporations have seats at the trading table.
While the TPP grants corporate giants such as Walmart and Monsanto the power to bypass Congress and the courts, the elected representatives of the American people are kept from even seeing the draft version of the agreement.
As with the multitude of similar trade pacts the United States has formed, the ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a regional super government, thus the stonewalling of federal lawmakers who dare seek to assert some sort of oversight.
In the case of the TPP, the zone would be called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include all the current TPP participants: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
The ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP, though. Supporters of the deal insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.”
Integration is a word that is painful to the ears of constitutionalists and those unwilling to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a committee of globalists who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. Integration is an internationalist tool for subordinating American law to the globalist bureaucracy at the United Nations.
Economic and political integration will push the once independent United States of America into yet another collectivist bloc that will facilitate the complete dissolution of our country and our states into no more than subordinate outposts of a one-world government.
Equally significant is that 600 industry lobbyists and “advisors,” as well as unelected trade representatives, are at the table, while representatives from the public at large and businesses other than huge monopolies are conspicuously absent.
Each of the “partners” to the pact, including foreign corporations, would be exempted from abiding by American laws governing trade disputes. Moreover, the sovereignty of the United States and the Constitution’s enumeration of powers would once again be sacrificed on the altar of global government by subordinating U.S. laws passed by duly elected representatives of the people to a code of regulations created by a team of unelected transnational bureaucrats.
Americans who study the subject realize that the redrawing of national boundaries and domestic legal processes being carried out in secret by the globalists sitting around the TPP negotiating table is an attack on American laws, American courts, American freedom of expression, American sovereignty, and the American Constitution. Any person seeking the presidency must realize that executing many of the mandates of the TPP would require that person to violate the presidential oath of office.
Photo of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.): AP Images
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton.
