Senators offer bill to block any U.S. president from leaving NATO
Senators offer bill to block any U.S. president from leaving NATO
Democratic and Republic senators renewed an effort to block any U.S. president from leaving NATO on Wednesday, as leaders of the alliance attended an eventful summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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I'm surprised all treaties aren't handled this way. We have such a high bar to approve them for a reason, it seems silly to not have a similarly high bar to leave them.
I do understand why you would want to be able to exit fast. I think it makes sense for the individual country as a safety net in case whatever deal you've entered goes south.
...but having a system in place to ensure that the majority agrees with that decision is important.
Amy Coney Barrett proves that the US legislature can move fast whenever it wants to.
And now I'm picturing a Republican Congress and Presidency being voted out by the people, only to have the exiting Congress pass a "We Hereby Exit From All Treaties" bill, signed by the President before the changeover happens. All to leave the incoming Democratic Congress/President with a huge foreign relations mess to clean up.
I do understand why you would want to be able to exit fast.
If there's a legitimate reason why we would need to "exit a treaty fast", then I'm sure that Congress would have no issues approving it. I mean, I know we're in the era of "because fuck you that's why" politics, but if we needed to exit a treaty quickly, there has to be some pretty grave circumstances why, and I'm sure that even the dumbest of the dumb would know to put politics aside for a bit.
You give “the dumbest of the dumb” more credit than I would.
Even Kevin McCarthy knew when it was time to back down when it came to the debt ceiling fight. When push comes to shove in issues like this, the GOP have historically threatened a default right up until the very last second and then backed down. Most of the time, the threats are little more than red meat for their base and they know (even if they don't want to publicly say it) that if they were to attempt to follow through on their threats, the results would be significantly worse for everybody.