Yale Prof Wants Constitution Amended to Impose International Law on Americans
“argues that the United States should model its constitution after post-war Germany’s, insofar as its respect for international law over national sovereignty goes”
This is an example of why people on the left are so offended by the idea of America first. Some of them actually think this way.
Campus Reform reports:
USA governed by international law? Yale prof explains his proposed constitutional amendment.
Last week, Samuel Moyn, who serves as a professor of both history and jurisprudence at Yale University, argued for a constitutional amendment that would impose international law on American citizens.
Writing for The New York Times, Moyn made his claim in a piece that features a series of essays advocating for hypothetical amendments to the United States Constitution. In Moyn’s essay, he argues for an amendment that he surmises as “International law shall be part of American law.”
Moyn includes a reference to Nazi Germany.
“While the United States today is a far cry from Nazi Germany,” he continued “it has nonetheless proved itself to be a threat to world peace, blatantly and regularly violating international rules or letting its lawyers twist limits on war into licenses to strike.”
Moyn argues that the United States should model its constitution after post-war Germany’s, insofar as its respect for international law over national sovereignty goes. According to him, this would be necessary for America’s “atonement.”
Campus Reform asked Moyn if his amendment would diminish the democratic sovereignty of the American people to which he responded “any amendment to the US Constitution reflects a supermajority of the people: it has passed with support of at least two thirds of the members of each house of Congress, and of three quarters of the states. So the amendment would be democratic in that sense.”
The proposed amendment, Moyn says in The New York Times, would “[place] constraints so the country cannot launch disastrous wars of choice as easily or send drones or special forces practically anywhere for deadly missions.”
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Comments
This isn’t really about war, it’s about giving the rest of the world unlimited license to loot us.
Why doesn’t he just go move to another country, then?
With the current power structure in the UN, we would have China and its minions dictating what our laws are. No way.
If William Buckley had lived in New Haven, he would have said that he’d prefer to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the New Haven phone directory then by the Yale faculty.
He has a point about the wars of choice. But why don’t the people have control of the system and the ability to stop them? That’s how our system is failing. My whole life, we’ve had one stupid war after another, none of them justified, none doing us any good, usually on the wrong side. They were not popular, people tried voting for the presidential candidate that wouldn’t get us into wars, and then they turned around and did it anyway.
Like Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection on the platform “he kept us out of the war”. He won, and promptly instituted a draft for WW1. Our first draft since the Civil War, and it was a far less popular war than that.
His proposed constitution wouldn’t just prevent us from starting or entering wars. It would sign us up to all kinds of climate change rules, trade rules, and other nonsense that would only hurt us worse. And he knows it, maybe he just doesn’t want to say it.
Another legal whackademic with a harebrained idea to amend the constitution….Jeez Louise….like that has any real chance of passing in 38 state legislatures who are already angry that Congress has usurped many of their prerogatives and powers?! And does Professor Halfwit think Congress is going to give up one nanogram of its power? Perhaps he should put down the meth before he starts writing bogus amendments based on his hallucinations.
a professor of … history
He obviously has never actually read and understood it. Why is he teaching it?
proved itself to be a threat to world peace
Now do… everybody else. Compared to any other power in the world today, America has least upset ‘world peace’.
What a maroon.
Maybe the competition is very weak. But our record with Afghanistan (a glorious 20 years), Iraq, Clinton’s mucking around in eastern Europe, etc. etc. isn’t very clean either.
So Professor Blither thinks we should abandon our national sovereignty? He likes the idea of national suicide? He is one of those educated fools my father spoke of.
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Imposing international law, in many respects, would LOWER standards. The US has been doing this longer than most and has progressed far more in rights and responsibilities than the mean of international law.