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What alarms Bricker & Co. is the possibility that, in this era of statism and the reform-by-treaty urge, the U.S. might enter into treaties that sooner or later could be used to enlarge the power of the Federal Government or even to dilute or undermine the Bill of Rights. Says Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen, a red-hot supporter of the Bricker Amendment: "We are in a new era of international organizations. They are grinding out treaties like so many eager beavers which will have effect on the rights of American citizens."
Since 1945, the U.S. has:
¶ Ratified the U.N. Charter, Articles 55-56 of which pledge members to promote, among other things, "conditions of economic and social progress" and respect for rights "without distinction as to race."
¶ Endorsed (but not ratified) the Genocide Convention. Setting out to make mass murder an international crime (and it was a crime, whatever the U.N. might say or not say), a U.N. commission ended up with a complex document defining "genocide" to include "causing . . . mental harm" to members of "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Under such a far-afield provision, expressions of honest opinion might become crimes.
¶ Helped draft a U.N. Covenant of Human Rights. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was for two years chairman of the drafting commission, but the influence of delegates from the Soviet Union and other dictatorships is apparent in the document. The covenant dilutes such natural rights as freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly by mixing them with highly dubious "rights." Some of these "rights" would enlarge government powers instead of restricting them. According to the covenant, for example, the state is obliged to see to such things as "healthy development of the child" and "environmental hygiene" and "the right of everyone" to a job, fair wages, adequate housing, education and "a continuous improvement of living conditions." These goals are desirable, but if a government determinedly set out to provide them "for everyone" (which it could not do anyway), it would have to become even more totalitarian than, say, the Soviet Union.
When the steel strike came before the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice Vinson gave an example of how lawyers, bent on enlarging the federal power, can use the existence of treaties in an effort to make domestic law. Vinson's main argument was that Truman derived a power to seize the steel mills from the existence of an international emergency. He buttressed this by recalling that the U.N. covenant and the North Atlantic Treaty bind the U.S. to resist armed attack against any member nation. In his view, Truman's seizure was justified, in part, by the obligation of the U.S. to keep up its promised deliveries of steel products to its allies.
Fortunately, Vinson's was a minority view. If the court majority had upheld the steel seizure, with an argument based partly on treaties, the Bricker Amendment would be a lot further along than it now is.