Bricker Amendment

The Bricker Amendment is the collective name of a number of slightly different proposed amendments to the United States Constitution considered by the United States Senate in the 1950s. None of these amendments ever passed Congress. Each of them would require explicit congressional approval, especially for executive agreements that did not require the Senate's two-thirds approval for treaty. They are named for their sponsor, conservative Republican Senator John W. Bricker of Ohio, who distrusted the exclusive powers of the president to involve the United States beyond the wishes of Congress.

American entry into World War II led to a new sense of internationalism opposed by many conservatives. Frank E. Holman, president of the American Bar Association (ABA), called attention to federal court decisions, notably Missouri v. Holland, which he claimed could give international treaties and agreements precedence over the United States Constitution and could be used by foreigners to threaten American liberties. Bricker was influenced by the ABA's work and first introduced a proposed constitutional amendment in 1951. With substantial popular support and the election of a Republican president and Congress in the elections of 1952, together with support from many Southern Democrats, Bricker's plan seemed destined to pass Congress by the necessary two-thirds vote and be sent to the individual states for ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

The best-known version of the Bricker Amendment, considered by the Senate in 1953–54, declared that no treaty could be made by the United States that conflicted with the Constitution; treaties could not be self-executing without the passage of separate enabling legislation through Congress; and treaties could not give Congress legislative powers beyond those specified in the Constitution. It also limited the president's power to enter into executive agreements with foreign powers.

Bricker's proposal attracted broad bipartisan support and was a focal point of intra-party conflict between the Eisenhower administration, which represented the more internationalist liberal Republican element, and the Old Right faction of conservative Republican senators, based in isolationist Midwestern strongholds. Despite the initial support, the Bricker Amendment was blocked through the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senate Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson. It failed in the Senate by a single vote in 1954, and was never voted on by the House.

Three years later the Supreme Court of the United States explicitly ruled in Reid v. Covert that the Bill of Rights cannot be abrogated by agreements with foreign powers. Nevertheless, Bricker's ideas still have supporters, and new versions of his amendment have been reintroduced in Congress periodically.

The attack on Pearl Harbor temporarily silenced American non-interventionism; the America First Committee disbanded within days. However, in the final days of World War II, non-interventionism began its resurgence— non-interventionists had spoken against ratification of the United Nations Charter but were unsuccessful in preventing the United States from becoming a founding member of the United Nations. Suspicions of the UN and its associated international organizations were fanned by conservatives, most notably by Frank E. Holman, an attorney from Seattle, Washington, in what has been called a "crusade".

Holman, a Utah native and Rhodes scholar, was elected president of the American Bar Association in 1947 and dedicated his term as president to warning Americans of the dangers of "treaty law." While Article II of the United Nations Charter stated "Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state," an international analogue to the Tenth Amendment, Holman saw the work of the UN on the proposed Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous proposals of the International Labour Organization, a body created under the League of Nations, as being far outside the UN's powers and an invasion against American liberties.

Holman argued that the Genocide Convention would subject Americans to the jurisdiction of foreign courts with unfamiliar procedures and without the protections afforded under the Bill of Rights. He said the Convention's language was sweeping and vague and offered a scenario where a white motorist who struck and killed a black child could be extradited to The Hague on genocide charges. Holman's critics claimed the language was no more sweeping or vague than the state and federal statutes that American courts interpreted every day. Duane Tananbaum, the leading historian of the Bricker Amendment, wrote "most of ABA's objections to the Genocide Convention had no basis whatsoever in reality" and his example of a car accident becoming an international incident was not possible. Eisenhower's Attorney General Herbert Brownell called this scenario "outlandish".