In 1987, Joe Biden stood up to Ronald Reagan's attempted increase of executive authority in interpreting what a treaty means, and tried to stop the development of the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as "Star Wars."
The US and Russia had signed the ABM Treaty in 1972, and now Reagan wanted to build his Star Wars. Senators said that this would require amending the ABM Treaty, but Reagan countered that all that was needed was a "reinterpretation."
When opponents pointed out that the ratification hearing on the Treaty in the Senate did not support this reinterpretation, the Administrated cited a record of secret negotiations to support its reinterpretation!
Biden was like, "wtf?! You can have a secret shadow treaty that the Senate approves without its knowledge when it ratifies another treaty." So Biden introduced a resolution known as the "Biden Condition."
Biden attempted to limit the possible meanings of any treaty to "what the Senate understands the treaty to mean when it gives its advice and consent."
The Senate added this condition to the INF Treaty. But after signing that treaty, Reagan was all, "um, no" on the Biden Condition.
After much legal and political wrangling, the Executive Branch conceded that a secret treaty cannot exist because the Senate cannot give its constitutionally mandated consent to something it knows nothing about. The Office of Legal Counsel of the DOJ (yes, the same Office of Legal Counsel one responsible for the recent Torture Memos) issued an opinion stating that the president "could not reach a secret agreement with the other party that substantially modifies the obligations and authorities created by the text of the treaty submitted to the Senate, and then seek to use the secret agreement as a basis for actions inconsistent with the text of the treaty."
Bottom line: Biden stood up to expanding executive power and against the Star Wars program, and he won. Yay!
This post was sourced from Stephen Dycus, et. al., National Security Law (4th ed. 2007).
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Comments
I think he has the perfect expressive face for a serious wtf...which is ok with me.
Thanks for this reminder LeC. Yay indeed!
Did Star Wars not proceed? Did Reagan not operate an entire shadow government and get away with everything he wanted to get away with? Have not some of the very same people to whom Biden must have made his wft comment in 1987 been actually running the show for the past eight years?
Skeptic Turtle is pleased because Biden will be a good "attack dog" in the campaign. Well, yes. There will be barking and gnashings of teeth, perhaps even some foaming at the mouth - all of which will sell newspapers and internet advertising and be good for ratings. But please forgive me if I call "all-bark-no-bite" on Joe Biden.
Apparently to have Hope is audacious indeed.
Who would you have picked over Biden?
Toppling the USSR was really an unintended consequence. The Repugs, as we all now know, spent the next 11 years looking for a new "common enemy," and upon finding one, have used it for all it's worth.
Who would I have picked? Well, if I'm Barack Obama and I believe in my message of change and I believe there is a well-spring of desire and desperation among the people for real change, if I believe in my own ability to catalyze the spirit and the can-do attitudes latent in a once-great nation with a history of manifesting things the conventional wisdom said could never be accomplished, then I would find someone smart and talented and young and good-looking like myself, perhaps a trained lawyer (well, of course, a trained lawyer) maybe from the State Department, or the Justice Department, or from some state key to electoral victory, someone only the most inside of the inside would even know of but who would blow away the American people when I introduced her to them, and whose hand I would be proud and confident in raising on the podium next week in Mile High Stadium, and with whom I would barnstorm this country in the next two and a half months to will the people into believing in my message of hope and change and a different way of bringing on a new morning in America.
That's who I would have picked, not a reckless-speaking eight or ten term senator who will make the military-industrial-financial establishment in this country think, "well, maybe we could live with that."
Oh,I see. We're going over the 'Reagan defeated the Soviets' myth again, isn't it.
::sigh::
Great, powerful empires rarely collapse from external pressures...they almost always collapse from within. The Soviet Empire was no different, and you needn't look any further than the decaying Soviet economy by the 70s...
He will make a great attack dog, in a manner that resonates with the workin' class Mericans.