A transnationalist cannot ‘uphold’ the Constitution

A transnationalist cannot ‘uphold’ the Constitution: "Tuesday afternoon, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have an opportunity to demonstrate why the Framers gave the Senate the constitutional power to confirm presidential appointees. If they fail to exercise that power vigorously with respect to the nomination of Harold Koh to be the top State Department lawyer, they will not only have been derelict. They will be accomplices to an assault on our Constitution that will ultimately result in an unprecedented, and likely permanent, derogation of the Senate’s vital role and responsibilities.

After all, Mr. Koh is one of the nation’s most prominent - and aggressive - proponents of a set of hoary notions that, for shorthand, can be described as “universal jurisprudence.” Reduced to its essence, adherents to Koh’s school of transnationalism believe that the Constitution of the United States and the laws that flow from it must be continuously “improved” in extra-constitutional ways.

To be sure, such transnationalists profess to find support for their desire to morph our statutes and rulings, so as to conform them to the international “norms” and judicial rulings with which they are at odds, by citing the very founders whose handiwork and clear purpose they treat with such contempt. On the grounds that the the Declaration of Independence exhibited a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” they contend we are obliged to do so today as well. This requires, in Koh’s words, that we “internalize” into our domestic legal code and policies whatever dictates should, in the “opinion” of others, govern. "