Sovereignty Under Assault

NRO has a great interview up with Jeremy Rabkin regarding the dying concept of national sovereignty:

NRO: How did the Founding Fathers view sovereignty?

Rabkin: The Constitution makes federal law (and the federal Constitution) "supreme law of the land." States don't even have the last word on their own constitutions (or when they can adhere to their own constitutions). All of the Founders would have been appalled at the thought that the federal government, in turn, would be subordinate to some supranational or international entity, which could claim priority in this way over the American Constitution and American laws.

NRO: Is the sovereignty advocated by the Founders eroding in America?

Rabkin: Perhaps "eroding" is too strong a term. But we are not as alert to dangers as we once were. For example, the Supreme Court has recently invoked foreign legal decisions as a guide to interpreting the U.S. Constitution — on the apparent assumption that our own constitution ought to be consistent with what the Court has called the opinions of "the world community." The premise is that the world is evolving toward consensus and the United States must be part of that. The purpose of sovereignty is to safeguard our right to be different — because we have no good reason to think others know better than Americans how our nation should be governed or that Americans will be more attached to world law than our own law.

What concerns me is the general idea that America is offending other nations by holding to its own constitutional scheme. We shouldn't be apologetic about that. We have good moral claims to hold to our own traditional governing scheme. Sovereignty may be out of fashion in Europe but it still has lots of appeal to most countries in most other parts of the world.

This is what's most appalling with the latest decision the brain-addled septuagenarians of the Supreme Court regarding the application of the death penalty to juveniles---overturning American law crafted by American legislators on the basis of "international consensus" is a direct assault on our sovereignty.

Were we not founded on the very notion that we have a right to choose our government representatives? Which Americans elected the Brussels bureaucrats Anthony Kennedy and the other four pinheads on the Court swoon over?

This will be the sleeper foreign policy and judicial issue of the next couple of election campaigns.