ORMOND BEACH -- Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampsire, Mike Johanns of Nebraska, Rob Portman of Ohio and Johnny Isakson of Georgia were among the 34 brave souls in the U.S. Senate to give the “Law of the Seas Treaty” the deep six.
“Proponents of the Law of the Sea treaty aspire to admirable goals, including codifying the U.S. Navy’s navigational rights and defining American economic interests in valuable offshore resources. But the treaty’s terms reach well beyond those good intentions,” Ayotte and Portman wrote in a Monday letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
“This agreement is striking in both the breadth of activities it regulates and the ambiguity of obligations it creates,” the pair continued. “It’s 320 articles and over 200 pages establish a complex regulatory regime that applies to virtually any commercial or governmental activity related to the oceans — from seaborne shipping, to drug and weapon interdiction, to operation a manufacturing plant near a coastal waterway.”
Why any American would want to cede authority to the United Nations that completely destroys our international sea-going interests, is nuts.
However, this is typical of the over-arching bills so beloved by the Obama Administration. Tax and spenders like Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton think giving taxing and permitting authority over activity on international waters to a U.N.-created agency is dandy. More redistribution of wealth from the workers to the non-workers.
Personally, dumping the U.N. is high on my list of objectives to return America to Americans. Why don’t they set up shop in Russia or China and get the freebies from those governments?