Senate Democrats and President Obama want the United States to sign onto the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which would strip the United States of sovereignty and transfer wealth from the US to other nations. It’s a truly rotten idea, so it’s no wonder the Democrats are quietly putting off a vote for ratification until after the election.

Mr. Kerry said he hoped to avoid ensnaring the treaty, which is opposed by some conservatives, in the presidential election campaign.

“I do not want this treaty to become victim to that race or the politics of the moment,” Sen. [John] Kerry [D-MA] said. “We will wait until the passions of the election have subsided before we vote.”

Obama administration officials want ratification this year, but said a vote could be held in the lame-duck period following the election.

Michelle Malkin pointed out in her column last week how the progressives have been pushing this for decades.

The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that “no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth’s surface over to the Third World.” According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the “central, and abiding, defect” was “its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states — and most especially the United States.”

The persistent transnationalists who drafted LOST favor creation of a massive United Nations bureaucracy that would draw ocean boundaries, impose environmental regulations and restrict business on the high seas. They’ve tinkered with the document obsessively since the late ’60s, enlisted Presidents Clinton and Bush, and recruited soon-to-depart GOP Sen. Dick Lugar to their crusade. Ignore the mushy save-the-planet rhetoric. Here’s the bottom line: Crucial national security decisions about our naval and drilling operations would be subject to the vote of 162 other signatories, including Cuba, China and Russia.

While our sovereignty would be redistributed around the world, most of the funding for the massive LOST regulatory body would come from — you guessed it! — the United States. (Read More)

I’m sure the Democrats are hoping they can ram this through the Senate after the elections, when people stop paying attention and are focused on the holidays.

In his new book Screwed!: How Foreign Countries Are Ripping America Off and Plundering Our Economy-and How Our Leaders Help Them Do It, Dick Morris warned about this treaty, as well as others, that Obama wants to enter into that would be binding on the US once ratified. The items in bold relate to LOST, but the others are just as alarming.

Here’s what the globalists are trying to do:

- Take away the right of Congress or the president to go to war unless the United Nations approves (that is unless we get Russia and China not to veto the resolutions.

- Hold American presidents and cabinet members criminally responsible for going to war without UN approval.

- Limit the right of the US Navy to keep the seas open.

- Require half of the royalties from offshore oil and gas drilling and mineral mining to go to a UN body to distribute as it wishes with no real control by the United States.

- Require us to share our offshore drilling technology with all other nations.

- Require us to assure, through registration and other intrusive methods, that none of the gun owners in America export their weapons to other countries.

- Establish international jurisdiction over firearms in the United States.

Neither the push for ratification of LOST, nor the administration’s openness to the International Criminal Court (which could override US courts) has garnered much attention from the media. That’s the way the Democrats want it, which is why they’re putting this on the back burner until they think you aren’t looking. Let your Senator know you’re paying attention. You can find the phone number of your US Senators here. If you have trouble getting through, try the main switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

Morris’s book includes much more, be sure to check it out.

Update: Linked by The Grumpy Elder – thanks!

Update: Linked by Heritage Action – thanks!