[johnwk]

Why did our Founders decide to require a two thirds vote rather than a simple majority to approve deals cooked up by our president? Our Founding Fathers fear is expressed in Federalist No. 75 by Hamilton with regard to the President’s treaty making authority and sheds light on why the President was not granted an arbitrary power to make “CONTRACTS with foreign nations, which have the force of law.” Hamilton points out the president:

“might sometimes be under temptations to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue to withstand. An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”

So, as it turns out, the founders intentionally commanded by our Constitution, that any deals cooked up by the president with a foreign power would not have “the force of law” unless approved by two thirds of the Senators present!

What supporters of Fast Track do not want to admit, and our big media including Fox News refuses to discuss is, having been ruled by a despotic King our founders feared creating an omnipotent president and thus limited his powers significantly by a number of provisions in our Constitution, one being the two thirds vote requirement as mentioned above. And to give another specific example of how much our founders feared an omnipotent president, they even refused giving the President Line-item veto power! And with respect to the reasons for this particular power being denied to the president, Benjamin Franklin, on June 4th of the Constitutional Convention reminds the delegates how they suffered under that power. He says:

'”The negative of the governor was constantly made use of to extort money. No good law whatever could be passed without a private bargain with him. An increase of salary or some donation, was always made a condition; till at last, it became the regular practice to have orders in his favor on the treasury presented along with the bills to be signed, so that he might actually receive the former before he should sign the latter. When the Indians were scalping the Western people, and notice of it arrived, the concurrence of the governor in the means of self-defense could not be got, until it was agreed that the people were to fight for the security of his property, whilst he was to have no share of the burdens of taxation.''

It is very troubling that our Republican Party Leadership, and our media personalities at Fox News which claims to be "fair and ballanced” i.e., Tammy Bruce, Monica Crowley, Eric Bolling, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Greg Gutfeld, Dana Perino, Megyn Kelly, Neil Cavuto, John Stossel, Greta Van Susteren, Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, etc., are willing to ignore the Pacific Rim deal which Obama has cooked up cannot be made enforceable law until a two thirds approval vote is secured from our national legislature which expresses the people's voice.

JWK


The whole aim of construction, as applied to a provision of the Constitution, is to discover the meaning, to ascertain and give effect to the intent of its framers and the people who adopted it._____HOME BLDG. & LOAN ASS'N v. BLAISDELL, 290 U.S. 398 (1934)