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Three-Card Barry and the U.N. Treaty Flim-Flam
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

I am not a lawyer. Nor do I play one on TV. But this gives me an advantage: I am still able to read, and to think. I can count the lawyers I know who are still capable of that on the fingers of one elbow.

Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration. Some of my best friends, as the saying goes, are lawyers. But like most libertarians and decent conservatives, I discovered, somewhere back along the line, that there is nary an attorney in this country who possesses the memory, or the understanding of history and human nature, manifested by the average cocker spaniel, or, when pressed, can think his way out of a wet paper bag.

Nowhere is this more in evidence today than in connection with a couple of arguments that have been going on about the United States Constitution, with regard to international treaties and the Bill of Rights. Not amazingly, both of these controversies involve that most vile of human aggregations, that fetid snakepit of conspiracies, that sickening, demented eugenicist's hive of genocide and democide, that pustulent cyst on the buttocks of our lovely Mother Gaia, the United Nations.

Not that it matters. It's all a sham. A confidence game.

The item that most individuals who are not libertarians or decent conservatives appear concerned with is an agreement between the United States and a bunch of other countries with regard to prohibiting the production, transportation, sale, and use of some—but not all— drugs.

It's as phony as a three-dollar bill.

The principal purpose of this treaty is to provide a steady stream of obscene wealth and evil power to criminal drug lords, like those in Colombia and Mexico, to official drug lords, like those in the CIA and DEA, and to countless millions of bureaucrats and police officers who can't seem to make it on their salaries like the rest of us. Without international laws to raise the price of common agricultural products to thousands of dollars an ounce—from their natural price of dry spit—they would face certain (and well-deserved) unemployment and destitution.

Instead. they're well paid—better than most of us—to beat people up and kill them for a living, collecting what they can on the side.

So when the semi-sovereign American states of Colorado and Washington, desperately fearing bankruptcy and looking for something else to tax, reluctantly decided to let the voters make it legal to grow, process, transport, sell, and use the most popular of those drugs—good old Mary Jane—(admittedly under the most infantile regimentation imaginable), the drug-law dependent United Nations put its jackbooted foot down, ordering the government of the United States to suppress this terrifying (if entirely false) outbreak of individual liberty.

So far, the United States government has obediently complied, defying the will of the people it was established to serve (who naively believe they're the ones who decided to legalize pot) with the excuse that it is obligated to prohibit drugs by treaty, citing Article 6, Section 2 of the Constitution, which holds that "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land ..."

They wish.

Unfortunately for the drug-law pushers, this cannot logically or legally apply to the Bill of Rights, for two reasons. To begin with, there is the greatly neglected Ninth Amendment, which states that all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government, or to the states, reside with the people. Smoking dope is a Ninth Amendment right.

Everybody always seems to forget the Ninth Amendment in favor of the holy Tenth. But the Ninth says that human rights are more or less infinite. It's there because many of the Founders didn't want their rights limited to those actually enumerated in the remainder of the document, which is an instrument for controlling government, not people.

Congress very clearly understood this principle when they passed the Volstead Act in 1919, outlawing alcohol. They believed (correctly) that they also had to pass a Constitutional amendment to make it legal. Drug laws have no such amendment to exempt them from the Ninth Amendment, so they, themselves are illegal. Any treaty we have with other satrapies agreeing to outlaw drugs is equally null and void.

But even more importantly—and this is the part that requires thinking—the Bill of Rights, including Numero Nueve is a series of amendments to the Constitution. Therefore, they supercede— they take precedence over—everything else in the document, that being in the very nature of amendments, by definition. It may well be that other laws and treaties are given equal status to the main body of Constitution, but they, too, must be overruled by the Bill of Rights.

Clearly, it doesn't matter whether the Secretary of State or the President signs it, or whether the Senate ratifies it or not. Such a treaty is not the law of the land. It is nothing more than wastebasket fodder.

Can anyone dispute this?

Raise your right hand—no, your other right hand—if you really believe the Founding Fathers, who were not the result of three hundred years of deliberate dumbing down by government, whorish media, and the public school system, would have set up something like the Bill of Rights, only to make it vulnerable to the whims of foreign nabobities—like England, France, and Germany—who "hate our freedom"?

And here's the part you've been waiting for: exactly the same thing applies in the case of the U.N.'s "small arms treaty", which sounds like a warm and fuzzy way to keep wars from happening, but is actually meant to prevent people from wrenching control of their lives away—and keep them away—from the tyrannical thugs the U.N. was created and commissioned to maintain in power, despite the will of the people. The treaty has nothing to do with arms in government hands, only with those in the hands of private individuals all over the world.

Somehow, I doubt that rebels willing to overthrow the all-too-real governments of their own countries will worry much about obeying the pathetic imperatives of a toy government headquartered in Manhattan. It's all academic, anyway. America was born in a struggle about private weapons. Let them pass—or ratify—any legislation they please.

Americans have obeyed their last gun law.

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