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Will ACTA Be Found Unconstitutional?
DustyShadow writes "Harvard's Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig have an interesting op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, arguing that it would be constitutionally dubious for President Obama to adopt the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as an executive agreement. '[T]he Obama administration has suggested it will adopt the pact as a "sole executive agreement" that requires only the president's approval. ... Joining ACTA by sole executive agreement would far exceed these precedents. The president has no independent constitutional authority over intellectual property or communications policy, and there is no long historical practice of making sole executive agreements in this area. To the contrary, the Constitution gives primary authority over these matters to Congress, which is charged with making laws that regulate foreign commerce and intellectual property.'"
Your snarky and insulting Glenn Beck-esque commentary on my breadth of reading knowledge and skill is completely out of line. If you're going to try to participate in a civilized discussion between reasonable adults then you need to act like one.
I suspect that you have some bizarre formalist definition of what a republic is. Obviously you didn't get it "from a book" because Kant is not a political philosopher (he deals in metaphysics) and Paine was the Emanuel Bronner of his age.
Have you read any of the classics on republic theory? This would include John Locke's Two Treatises and other works, Rousseau's Social Contract, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, to a lesser extent Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Ernst Renan's essay "What is a Nation?". One of the big undercurrents in most of these works is the idea that a republic has to have the power of self-determination -- that's to say you can have a government with elected officials and a bicameral legislature and all the other appurtenances of government, but if you lack the power of self-determination with respect to other nation-states, you aren't a republic. This is a big distinction that historians tend to make about Rome after the rise of Augustus -- there was still a Senate and consuls and more or less every other political office that had existed a hundred years earlier, but Rome was no longer a republic because these state organs had lost their ability to determine the national will.