Senate has treaties up its sleeve - Plenty of treaties have been sitting on the Senate docket for decades (04.01.11)

When the Obama administration coaxed a new arms agreement with Russia through the Senate just before adjournment, it was a resounding victory for the White House, and it showed once more that treaty ratification is sometimes a tricky task. Indeed, some of the treaties the administration has indicated it wants the Senate to approve have been sitting on the docket for decades. They deal with topics including the environment and the treatment of women and have collected dust over the years for reasons such as ideological opposition and objections from business groups. Ideological disputes helped make the latest Russian arms treaty, called New START, difficult to muscle to the finish line. Some conservatives argued that, despite assurances from the administration, the agreement would limit the United States’ ability to deploy a ballistic missile defense system. hat’s more, "Many conservative Republicans have tended to be skeptical of large multilateral treaties as a general matter, particularly some of the human rights treaties that have loose language," says John Bellinger III, a legal adviser of the State Department in the George W. Bush administration and now a partner at Arnold & Porter. or instance, a small group of conservative senators, led by James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have opposed the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, arguing that it could impinge on U.S. sovereignty. Obama has indicated his support for that treaty .President George Bush opposed a 1992 treaty meant to protect animal and plant diversity on the grounds that it could weaken patent protections for U.S. biotechnology companies. Opposition sometimes comes from the left, such as when trial lawyers and consumer groups teamed up to lobby in 1983 for the defeat of the Montreal Aviation Protocols that would have limited passenger damage awards that airlines pay after international crashes. The difference between the treaty-approval record of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations is instructive of how the conventional wisdom on treaties can be turned on its head. Bellinger points out that despite a reputation for disdaining international agreements, Bush pushed through 20 in his first two years. Obama, in his first two, has been able to ratify seven, although Bellinger predicts that the administration will devote itself more fully to treaties in the new year. No later than spring, Obama is expected to present to Congress his list of treaty priorities for the next two years, as he did in 2009. Arizona Republican Jon Kyl, who opposed New START, said after its approval that because the administration pushed the treaty through so aggressively, ratification of other arms control agreements, such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban that President Bill Clinton signed in 1996, would be more difficult. They might have been difficult anyway. Kyl, after all, led the defeat of the ban when it came before the Senate in 1999. Administration officials now are outwardly optimistic, however, arguing that the New START debate helped return arms control to the forefront. "There’s always been a bloc of opponents historically to nuclear arms reduction and control in the Senate," said Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of State for arms control, verification and compliance, at a Dec. 23 briefing with reporters. "That's part of a healthy debate; it's part of a healthy process. I don't see that as a major, major issue." But Bellinger says the environment for treaties will be difficult in 2011, given the tough fight over New START. The administration will have to choose its battles carefully: It won’t have many shots at winning approval for a big treaty before the election year rolls around and everything grinds to a halt.

-- Tim Starks, CQ Staff