George W. Bush: Gotta love him, gotta hate him
May 15, 2002

As a conservative, I have to hand it to the Bush people. Every time they do something to really upset me, they do something else that makes me want to cheer them on or hug someone at the White House.

I can think of few things more upsetting than the president’s signal to Congress that he was going to sign a farm bill more pork-laden than an Iowa hog farm.

This year’s farm bill makes a mockery of free market principles, but will force us all to ante up to put money into the pockets of rich farmers who don’t need help and allows Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) to pay off Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) for jumping ship. It is so bad that any Republican with even a passing interest in fiscal responsibility has to wonder whether anyone over at the White House even cares about the budget. It was so bad as it came waddling out of the House-Senate Conference Committee that neither Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) nor Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who agree on very little, would sign the committee report.

OMB was relatively silent on the whole thing, but one suspects that Mitch Daniels, who actually takes his green eyeshade responsibilities seriously, must be as silently apoplectic as the GOP House leadership.

That’s the bad news … or most of it.

The good news is that the administration has finally screwed up the courage to tell the architects of the International Criminal Court (ICC) that we aren’t going to play their game.

This is no small thing. The ICC was dreamed up by European idealists back in 1998. President Clinton embraced it as a lame duck and left it as a time bomb to be handled by his successor. It has never gone to the Senate for ratification, and Bush has on several occasions expressed opposition to the very idea of giving foreign bureaucrats and anti-American prosecutors recruited from God-knows- where the right to apprehend, try and perhaps imprison American citizens.

But until last week, the administration seemed undecided as to what might be done about the problem. The international community (if there is such a thing) maintains that once 60 nations signed on, the ICC will have jurisdiction over U.S. citizens regardless of whether we ever ratify it.

That has now happened.

In response, the White House has done what many conservatives thought should have been done earlier … not because we could actually stop the dangerous internationalist goofiness embodied in the ICC, but because the United States should have let everyone know from day one that we would never go along with it.

In finally announcing that the United States will refuse to be bound by the new court, the president has let the world know unequivocally that politically incorrect as it might be to oppose something as “high minded” as the ICC, he is not about to let a multinational bureaucracy override the traditional constitutional rights of Americans.
In taking this position, the president has aligned himself with House GOP Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and the House majority which passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2001, which, like virtually everything else the House has passed, languishes in the Senate. DeLay, with administration backing, is going to try to short-circuit the Senate by attaching it to the supplemental appropriations bill working its way through Congress.
We have always managed to police our own military and have in place a criminal justice system that — while not perfect — is far better than anything the folks who dreamed up the ICC will ever manage to create.

Denouncing the ICC and announcing that we won’t recognize its jurisdiction is a good start — but only a start. President Bush should serve notice on our allies that he agrees with Tom DeLay that the United States will not participate in any so-called peacekeeping missions in nations that recognize ICC jurisdiction and that the United States will veto any U.N. referrals to the ICC.

The so-called “human rights community” and the French will howl and call us names, but by doing so President Bush will have struck a real blow for our national interests, our sovereignty and our dignity.

He’ll also manage, by doing so, to successfully defuse yet another time bomb left on his doorstep by his predecessor.

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David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Washington-based government affairs consultant