If you think wheelchair ramps are the gateway to worldwide domination by the U.N., congratulations:
the Republican Party is for you.
Few things make for stranger theater than watching the old guard of the Republican Party try to reason with the clearly batshit insane ranks that rose up to take their place. For Republican ex-presidential candidate Bob Dole, ratifying the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a no-brainer, a world effort to codify the standards to which nations should be held in regards to their disabled citizens. There's nothing much controversial in there, and it's largely based on United States law to begin with. When it got to the Senate in 2012, Bob Dole was on the Senate floor in a wheelchair pushing his former colleagues to ratify it, but it failed dismally because the forces of batshit crazy are far, far stronger than an ex-presidential candidate
could hope to be.
Farris mounted a public campaign against the treaty when the Senate took it up in 2012, fanning concerns among prominent conservatives like Rick Santorum and The Heritage Foundation that it could infringe on the rights of parents whose children have disabilities, threaten states’ rights and become a legal tool for pro-choice advocates pushing against restrictive abortion laws.
That's underselling it. When I was at CPAC there was an entire panel on this and other schemes of the United Nations to something-something, and there the audience was told by the supposed actual lawyers and experts that these conventions would allow the United Nations to come and
take your children if they did not feel they were being cared for or educated properly. This is what Rick Santorum and the rest of the pants-wetting, Agenda 21-obsessed right absolutely believes will happen, once again because the entire movement is based on one asinine conspiracy theory after another, all self-tailored for maximum froth and panic, and it was
this contingent of the right that convinced Republican senators to kill the treaty the first time around. I'm not kidding. They think treaties like this are a pretext to the United Nations invading us (with our own army, apparently) and taking our children for re-education and turning us all into vegetarians and communists and subservient to our endangered manatee overlords. They furthermore think that "liberals" have been plotting to craft these treaties to do all these things in order to turn America over to the all-powerful United Nations, thus circumventing conservatives to destroy American self-rule. You think I'm exaggerating, but I'm not.
More below the fold:
Much of their efforts have been focused on the far-right home schooling community, because conservatives who homeschool their children are apparently considerably more gullible than the rest of the population—not really the best quality for self-educating your kids, but I digress. The Senate is hoping to revisit and ratify the convention this year, and that has unleashed the very same mechanism of batshit crazy versus not batshit crazy.
The treaty now includes several recommended add-ons, called reservations, understandings or declarations, that would clarify that it couldn’t affect American law.
Again, just to mollify the paranoid people. Guess if it worked. Go on, guess.
Farris said neither the add-ons nor the Bond ruling would keep the treaty from possibly infringing on domestic law. He also sees ratification as liberals’ “end-run” around the normal political process.
You see? It's a liberal plot. It's always a liberal plot.
Let's close with the wise sage Bob Dole, who is now a socialist and communist and in league with the U.N. because BJ Crazypants up there says so.
“I don’t know what the problem is with the Republicans,” Dole said. “I don’t know what the repercussions could be — it’s not a Democratic or Republican treaty, liberal or conservative.”
But he knows exactly what the problem is, as do we all. The problem is that the current majority of Republicans are batshit insane, period, too obsessed with conspiracy and secret imagined plots to ratify treaties or pass laws or even keep the federal government reliably open. They don't want to pass your treaty because they think it will lead to manatee overlords, and the sooner we all fess up and admit that's what's going on the sooner the Republican Party will repair itself.