Article II Treaties, RIP?

That’s what Thomas Geoghegan would like to see happen, as argued in this back-page piece in the latest issue of The American Prospect (teaser here). He argues that Kyoto, the Rome Statute, and human rights treaties should all get the NAFTA/WTO treatment, and that a Democrat president who looks to do things the old-fashioned way will be “looking straight down into Woodrow Wilson’s grave.”

It’s intriguing that this idea (which Steve Charnovitz advocated in this piece, and which possibility I addressed in a 2001 Texas Law Review article) may now be moving into policymaking circles. It would certainly be a constitutional gambit to broaden the use of the congressional-executive agreement, and one wouldn’t expect the Senate to take it lying down. But of course the congressional-executive agreement was a constitutional innovation from its early 20th century inception. If the politics were right, it might be worth taking the risk, and that would break a major logjam on the way to a more internationalist US orientation.