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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.'"
Yeah. It's not like the US actually cares about international agreements they don't like, anyway. See Kyoto.
The more I see of Obama, the more I want him impeached.
I feel like I made a BIG MISTAKE voting for the guy.
Like many people, I laughed at the right wing hysterics as mindless wharrgarbl, but this guy seems to be taking it upon himself to trample the constitution even more than Bush did. And while the Bush administration might have lied and cheated their way through getting Congress and the UN to back the Iraq war, at least they followed protocol and used proper channels.
The fact that Obama's health care plan took his promise for single payer universal coverage and turned it into a socialized cash-cow for insurance corporations with a unique provision forcing us to buy coverage or pay a "tax-penalty" and seeing him now trying to claim some sort of dictatorial power to force ACTA down our throats is startling. This is the second time he's taken a decidedly pro-corporate and potentially anti-consumer stance.
What next? Declaring we will get lower media prices and be allowed to use P2P freely without persecution, but must buy x-amount of MP3s, CDs and DVDs a month or pay a "tax" penalty? While it remains to be seen, I think the HCR Bill will prove to be the first of many attempts to socialize industry while forcing citizens to buy from or otherwise subsidize those industries with their non-taxed dollars.
Frankly, I think this direction he's taken towards establishing a socialized corporate state is alarming and a serious threat to our civil liberties.
It could quite literally end up making US citizen's indentured servants to corporations by levying "mandates" to force us to spend our non-taxed dollars on corporate goods and services. And while this may sound unprecedented and extreme, so have been the actions of Obama in regards to the HCR BIll and ACTA.
At the minimum, I think Obama needs to stand up and make his intentions clear. Why is he so adamant about ACTA? How can he declare victory with the HCR when it seems all he did was take away the socialist system he promised the PEOPLE and gave it to the corporations who have an obvious conflict of interest and have been little more than foxes guarding the henhouse? Obama's been great when it comes to grandstanding with photo ops and buzzwords. But what about a truly informative statement about his intentions with these brazenly pro-corporate endeavors?
Both of you were modded unfairly. You both should have gotten -1 Offtopic.
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