Treaties, Their Making and Enforcement Volume 21 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... entered into by the Congress, although they touched upon subjects within State control, were obligatory on the legislatures of the several States. To render this obligation an unavoidable constitutional obligation was a great purpose of the Constitution. The intention of those who adopted the Constitution as indicated by the records of that period was to vest the treaty-making power efficaciously in the President and Senate; and such intention finds direct expression in the Constitution, and conf1rmation in repeated decisions of the Supreme Court. Stipulations involving expressly or tacitly, immediately or ultimately, an expenditure, although the sums involved may not form a material item in the total expenditures of the government, are most common. For instance, the recent treaty referring to a joint commission the Alaskan boundary dispute, while not expressly stipulating for an expenditure, required an immediate special appropriation of $100,000. To admit the necessity of the concurrence of the House in all such treaties is to admit that body to an agency in the making of a large proportion of treaties concluded, and deny the efficacy of the treaty-making power as organized in the Constitution. 1Turner vt. Am. Baptist and Missionary Society, 5 McLean, 347. 'See Wharton's International Law Digest, vol. ii, p. 23.. S., 108. It may be further observed that in the first instance in which a stipulation expressly required an appropriation of a considerable amount, a precedent was intentionally established by the first defenders of the rights of the House in this respect, of withholding the treaty until it had been fully ratified and the ratifications exchanged. If the concurrence of the House is necessary to the validity of the stipulation, its...