May 28, 2012 – “Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not to his own facts,” goes the maxim popularized by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.).
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used it last week in introducing the latest effort to get the Senate to pass the Law of the Sea Convention.
The Law of the Sea Convention, in effect since 1994 and ratified by 160 countries, sets international freedom of navigation rules and the guidelines for the use of deep-sea resources, including mining and fishing. The United States has not ratified the treaty, first completed in 1982. Without signing the agreement, then-President Ronald Reagan announced in 1983 the United States would act “in accordance” with the convention’s traditional uses of the oceans except for the deep-sea mining provisions.
The treaty was amended in 1994 during the Clinton administration to meet the Reagan objections. Both the Clinton White House and George W. Bush’s administration in 2004 and ’07, along with a bipartisan group of senators, supported ratification. Nonetheless it failed to come to a vote.
Why? As then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote in a Sept. 17, 2007, letter to her state’s Republican senators, “Ratification has been thwarted by a small group of senators who are concerned about the perceived loss of U.S. sovereignty.”
Read the full story at the Washington Post.