Issue: Treaty Doc. 112-7; The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 13, 2006, and signed by the United States of America on June 30, 2009. Question: On the Resolution of Ratification (2/3 required).
Result: Rejected, 61 yeas to 38 nays, 1 not voting. GOP and Democrats scored.
Summary: State parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities are required to promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities and ensure that they enjoy full equality under the law. The Convention requires that domestic legislation address specific steps to ensure equality of opportunity, such as mandating special access for disabled persons, and the repealing of discriminatory legislation.
The Convention sets up an international Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to receive periodic reports from State parties on progress made in implementing the Convention (articles 34 to 39). An 18-article Optional Protocol on Communications allows individuals and groups to petition that Committee once all national recourse procedure have been exhausted.
Analysis: The Obama administration signed this treaty for the U.S. in 2009, but it must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate before the U.S. becomes a party.
Proponents of the treaty claim that it was modeled after the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and requires no changes to federal law. However, that is no big comfort, as the aforementioned act was a major unconstitutional leap in regulatory overreach by the federal government. Ratification of the treaty would make it more difficult to correct U.S. law. It is wrong on several counts to ratify a UN treaty that cedes U.S. authority over domestic matters to unelected, unaccountable UN bureaucrats in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
As with other UN treaties, the purported objectives are not the real agenda driving this treaty. The real agenda is to allow the internationalist-created and -dominated UN to become, step by step, the new global authority for domestic law, not the U.S. Constitution.
These UN conventions are promoted by a combination of internationalists and their revolutionary socialist brethren. As noted above, the convention empowers “individuals and groups” (read radical NGOs) to bring their complaints to an international tribunal.
Proponents of the treaty organized an intense lobbying campaign, and the Obama administration pressured individual senators to support ratification. There were no defectors among the Democrats. Opposition was carried entirely by enough of the Senate Republicans to deny proponents a two-thirds majority. Opponents objected properly to internationalist tactic of promoting power grabs in a lame duck session, thus insulating politicians from immediate voter reprisal.
However, like the Terminator, the Internationalists will be back when the time is ripe and they have preset the dials. Serious opponents must go on the offensive and target the UN and the Internationalist game plan. Otherwise, as Napoleon observed, “the purely defensive is doomed to defeat.”
We have assigned (good vote) to the Nays and (bad vote) to the Yeas. (P = voted present; ? = not voting; blank = not listed on roll call.)