Of Surrender and Sovereignty: A Tale of two Republican Parties

Is that a knife in your hand, or just a letter opener?

Just in case anybody is still wondering why Wisconsin Republicans lose statewide elections all the time, look no further than the GOP’s legislative leadership for a quick explanation.

They’ll stab you in the heart in an instant, all while shaking your hand.

Already this year we have seen the Republican leadership try to pass a give-away of monopoly money to special-interest utilities in the form of Right of First Refusal legislation. That charade even had some Republicans arguing that sometimes capitalism just doesn’t work. When that was exposed, they came back with Right of First Refusal II, which they comically called reform, and then they pushed Stewardship “reform” that would give radical land trusts everything they want in their ongoing land grabs of private property.

This week was the icing on the cake, when, with a few notable exceptions, our own Madison version of the Swamp came through with a budget that would make any Uniparty member proud. I’ll defer to my MacIver colleagues’ budget analyses for particular descriptions of the knives in your backs (William Osmulski does so with precision here), but for my point suffice it to say that these “conservatives” will grow state spending and government by 7.7 percent over the biennium.

That kind of surrender, or compromise, which is how these Republicans are billing it, is exactly how the federal government got into so much trouble over the years, and it’s why future generations will pay a hefty tab though a lower standard of living. Sure, there’s a tax cut in there—some sugar thrown into the sewer—but as MacIver CEO Annette Olson said: “The bottom line is this: Republican leadership sold out their constituents for a $180 tax cut.”

It was, all in all, a massive win for Gov. Tony Evers and the Democratic Party, from which they can begin to build upon heading into the 2026 elections. While Donald Trump and Washington Republicans have pushed the art of the deal in their budget process, let’s just say Wisconsin’s Republican legislative leadership pursued the rot of the deal, and, believe me, it is smelling in the most far-flung corners of the state.

The notable exceptions, meaning those Republican senators who acted responsibly by opposing this bill, were Chris Kapenga, (R-Delafield); Rob Hutton, (R-Brookfield); Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk); and Steve Nass (R-Whitewater. A lone Republican in the Assembly declined the invitation to swim in the muck, Rep. Scott Allen (R-Waukehsa).

So as conservatives everywhere look for actual conservatives in the rubble they call the state Republican Party, they can at least find that isolated contingent in Madison, but they can also look for conservative leadership in our federal caucus of lawmakers, which has, for the most part, stayed true to the mission of returning government to the people and protecting it from bureaucratic overreach.

In particular, Northwoods Rep. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson have been confronting the bureaucracy to wrest from its grip its unconstitutional accrual of power, and this week they were at it again. Specifically, while Republicans in Madison were bowing before the altar of ever bigger bureaucracy, Tiffany and Johnson were introducing legislation to preserve national sovereignty, the sacrifice of which would amount to the ultimate betrayal of the constitutional republic and the ultimate gift to be the bureaucratic state.

On June 26, Tiffany led the charge by reintroducing the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act, along with 10 House co-sponsors, including Rep. Tony Wied of Wisconsin, Claudia Tenney of New York, Harriet Hageman of Wyoming, and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. The bill would require a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate to approve any World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty.

At first blush, the bill may not seem like it belongs on the front burner, but it does. There’s no telling what might happen in the mid-terms, and, if the legislation isn’t passed and enacted, a future president could commit the U.S. to a pandemic treaty that absolutely threatens American sovereignty, despite what the bill’s critics say.

Intellectual property and massive infusions of tax dollars, not to mention the sharing of vaccines and other drugs in a pandemic (declared by the WHO, not by the U.S.), are all on the line, and a massive redistribution of proprietary technology and funding to the developing world, including China, could happen long before any pandemic or threat of pandemic ever arises.

“While President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the corrupt WHO, this legislation blocks future administrations from surrendering our sovereignty to globalist schemers,” Tiffany said in introducing the legislation. “The WHO’s repeated failures in pandemic response show it cannot be trusted, and congressional oversight ensures no single administration can sign our rights away to the UN.”

As Tiffany observed, while Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO and refused to sign the latest pandemic treaty, which was passed by the WHO’s World Health Assembly in May, this legislation is about what a future administration might do. And if past is prologue, that’s frightening if and when another progressive Democrat (and these days, they all are) returns to the White House.

Indeed, last week Tiffany pointed to the Biden administration’s willingness to sign onto the just-enacted treaty. Without the need to consult the Senate and win a supermajority approval, the United States could sign away the farm, but Tiffany’s legislation would provide much needed transparency and a heads up to the American public.

Johnson has introduced a companion bill in the Senate.

As an aside, before we jump into the particulars, GOP state lawmakers might want to take a look at what Tiffany and Johnson are doing these days, as sort of a crash course in learning how to be a conservative.

Why the bill is important

To be sure, the new treaty lacks some of the more egregious element of the draft that preceded the final document. I’ll get to that in just a sec, but there are plenty of red flags still fluttering and warning of a rip tide in the current, enough to make one wary of dipping a toe into it.

For instance there’s an entire chapter of the treaty devoted to “The World Together Equitably,” that is, “achieving equity in, for and through pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” That’s globalist speak for redistributing wealth from developed to developing nations, i.e, from rich to poor nations, through pandemic funding. Biden established a Pandemic Fund to grease the skids for American tax dollars to flow into this fund, just so everyone knows.

The key to this equity is that funding and products such as vaccines and treatments will run in one direction “equitably” from signatory nations such as those in western Europe to “developing” countries. China immediately hailed this framework, declaring that the agreement “will contribute to the fair distribution of health products, relevant technologies and resources to help developing countries enhance their capacities for prevention, preparedness and response.”

Of course, China was listed as a developing nation in the original draft. The final document does not explicitly say it is a developing nation, but China identifies as a developing nation and Beijing pretty much controls WHO, so what do you think?

The treaty also established the so-called Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) system, which will apply to manufacturers of “pandemic-related health products.” To access pathogen data and sequencing data, these companies will have to join the system, sign legally binding contracts, pay contributions to WHO, commit to provide a percentage of pandemic-related revenues to WHO in case of a pandemic, with a target of 20 percent, of which 10 percent must be a donation, and agree to technology transfers and shared licensing.

Nothing nefarious there, eh?

As the treaty states: “The distribution of these vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics shall be on the basis of public health risk and need, with particular attention to the needs of developing countries, and the Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network referred to in Article 13 may be used to this end.”

In other words, it’s from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, as determined by the WHO itself. It’s almost as if I’ve heard that line somewhere before.

With this scheme, the globalist WHO will increasingly control medical research and technology, and effectively nationalize, or internationalize, if you will, private sector health research into one giant government scheme. And by the way, it’s important to note that, while the treaty is publicized as a pandemic response document, its provisions apply at all times, not only during health emergencies.

Then there’s the WHO’s One Health Initiative, which is described as recognizing the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the environment. What this is is a dressed-up manifesto touting climate change activism as the key to all things being healthy. Or as the World Economic Forum describes it, “One Health approach is crucial in effectively addressing the interconnected health crises amplified by climate change.”

Naturally, to be effective, that will take a lot of spying on people, not to mention profiling for future behavior to plan for needed control measures, including reducing human pressures on the environment, the WEF states: “The One Health approach integrates predictive modeling and surveillance used in disease control and climate change to fight infectious diseases.”

Very reassuring.

Of course to accomplish all this there needs to be an institutional framework, and wouldn’t you know it, the WHO has that all figured out. Simply put, the plan is to integrate all major health research and participating institutions into one globalist regime under the auspices of the World Health Organization. That has been actually going on for a while, as in 2019, to cite one example, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security was officially re-designated as a Collaborating Centre for Global Health Security by the WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).

The process of internationalization is meant to accelerate the globalization of bureaucratic health governance, and it would do exactly that, were it not for inconvenient annoyances such as the Trump administration.

Now wait a minute

Supporters of this treaty, including most Democrats and the WHO itself, say none of this threatens national sovereignty, that it is all voluntary, and globalist institutions painstakingly point this out, as the United Nations did in a release right after the treaty was adopted:

So there you have it, nothing to worry about. Republicans at all levels can just go back to tending to their special-interest budget bills without having to look over their shoulders to see if WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is hulking over them, presumably with a syringe and needle.

Tedros himself assured everybody: “The agreement is a victory for public health, science and multilateral action. It will ensure we, collectively, can better protect the world from future pandemic threats.”

It’s just that using language such as “multilateral” (read international) and “collective” action doesn’t really make me sleep any better at night.

To be sure, and this is a very important point, the proposed treaty would not give the WHO direct power over domestic U.S. pandemic policies, as some critics allege that it would, and the final treaty was more demonstrative of that claim than previous drafts. But, as pointed out, the treaty and the amended regulations accompanying it are all about gutting sovereignty, only not directly. It’s a sneakbox of tricks and diversions that aspire to accomplish the same thing over time. That is to say, while the new treaty and regulations do not endorse the expansion of formal WHO authority over member states, it does transfer significant control of international funding authority to WHO and allows it to leverage domestic funds in a way to achieve its policy goals.

The array of regulatory and treaty changes would systematically transfer domestic tax dollars, proprietary technology, and intellectual property to foreign nations, particularly China and other developing countries. And return access to the benefits and features of an international response—access to our own dollars—would be bound by aligning with international response policies. The trick is to lure nations into binding contractual agreements that they cannot get out of later, and, even if they could, to begin to siphon resources from national treasuries while favorable regimes are in power, just as the Biden administration was preparing to do.

That’s why the Tiffany-Johnson legislation is so important. Had Harris won the election, we would have signed onto this treaty already, and the spigot would have been turned on, as the Biden-Harris administration promised to do, and not just with money but with technology transfers, product stockpiling, and waivers of intellectual property rights.

In other words, WHO would effectively have a say in domestic policy, no matter the sovereign wording in the treaty.

The Gostin playbook

In fact, the whole goal of the pandemic treaty has little to do with pandemic response and much to do with global control, using public health and fear-mongering about pandemics as a pretext. The history of pandemic preparedness in the United States spells all this out.

Let’s start with some recent history, an important important opinion coming from a WHO official who was touted as an expert on the organization’s pandemic and health regulations. That official is Lawrence Gostin, and back in a December 2021 briefing, he openly acknowledged that the treaty’s new framework was designed—think about this, designed—to erode sovereignty, and, what’s more, he said it in the context that it was a good thing.

I’ll get to the briefing in a moment, but first some background.

Since 2021, various nation members of WHO—which the United States rejoined after Joe Biden became president—were working on the initiative, the goal of which, according to a letter drafted by various world leaders in March of that year, included an agreement by nations to pursue coordinated “global public health countermeasures.” The letter was signed by the heads of 23 nations, including Boris Johnson of the UK and Angela Merkel, then the chancellor of Germany.

“No single government or multilateral agency can address this threat alone,” the letter stated. “The question is not if, but when. Together, we must be better prepared to predict, prevent, detect, assess and effectively respond to pandemics in a highly co-ordinated fashion. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe.”

And that meant a new new world treaty was needed, the leaders wrote:

And existing global instruments, such as the International Health Regulations (IHRs), would underpin such a treaty, these leaders wrote:

Of course, the leaders wrote, such a treaty should lead to more mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system and with its rules and norms.

What followed the leaders’ letter was the establishment of an Intergovernmental Negotiation Body (INB) to negotiate, draft, and sign a treaty and to finalize new international health regulations. Those who signed onto the treaty, meaning the U.S. at the time and other member nations, would commit to a highly co-ordinated response to pandemics as well as to a “collective commitment” rooted “in the constitution of the WHO.”

And there it is: The U.S. would commit not to following the U.S. Constitution but to following the constitution of an unelected global health body.

Notably, President Biden did not sign that March 2021 letter. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t fully supportive of the effort. Only thing was, Biden feared a treaty would require Senate approval with a supermajority, so the Biden administration, worried that it might not get approved, instead proposed amendments to existing international health regulations—those the world leaders said would underpin the treaty—that they thought would get around the constitutional requirements. And what they proposed were some doozies that surely made the signees of that world leaders’ letter drool at the prospect of such global centralization.

(It’s unclear whether Biden would have attempted to elude Senate approval by declaring that it wasn’t a real treaty, as Obama liked to do, but in any event the Tiffany and Johnson legislation would close that potential loophole.)

Treaty supporters and critics continue to debate what teeth these regulations actually have—i.e., if the treaty isn’t enforceable, neither are the regulations—but that legalistic debate misses the point. Whether or not such things as masking and lockdowns and vaccine mandates can be mandated by the WHO, that organization’s ability to declare an international public health emergency would affect our geopolitical, trade, travel, and other interactions with other countries, all of which effectively puts sovereignty in the crosshairs.

Which goes to the true motive: globalism. To document those true motives, we might look to the words of those leaders most deeply involved with WHO and its international health regulations. As mentioned, one of those people is Lawrence Gostin, a professor and the faculty director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, but more than that he is the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law and is on the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR) roster of experts.

I’d say that’s deeply involved.

For sure, Gostin has a long history in advocating for suspension of civil liberties in public health emergencies, and in fact his work was the impetus for many of the sweeping powers claimed by governors during the Covid pandemic. In the early 1990s, he was a principal author of the Model Emergency Health Powers Act (MEHPA), which would, among other things, empower states to quarantine, isolate, or fine anyone who refused to take untested drugs and vaccines and “suspend the provisions of any regulatory statute prescribing procedures for conducting state business, or the orders, rules and regulations of any state agency.”

On its face, the MEHPA was simply a draft act that states were encouraged to adopt, ostensibly to increase state powers to respond to bioterrorism or other outbreaks of disease. Ostensibly, this was an early and national version of the international pandemic treaty.

The draft came on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. Under the proposal, governors and state public health authorities could declare public health emergencies that would greatly expand the state’s police powers. 

Among other things, governors and public health officials would be empowered to preempt state laws and rules; control roads and public areas, including ingress and egress and the movement of people, not to mention to occupy premises in “threatened” areas; to track and share an individual’s personal health information and to compel health examinations; to identify and interview potentially infected persons, based on “reliable information”; to force persons to be vaccinated, treated, or quarantined for infectious diseases; and to isolate and quarantine any persons deemed necessary for the protection of public health.

Also under the plan the state could control public and private property during a public health emergency, including pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, nursing homes, other health care facilities, and communications devices.

As of 2011, most states had adopted some form of the laws granting governors greater emergency power. Some states, such as Wisconsin, had already given the governor and state and local public health authorities expansive authority.

So did Gostin—who has unabashedly called for the suspension of the constitution during public health emergencies—think WHO regulations would similarly chip away at sovereignty?

Why yes, he did. In an O’Neill Briefing about the proposed pandemic treaty, Gostin was excited about just that outcome. In the briefing, Gostin and his colleagues observed that the World Health Assembly—comprised of nearly every government in the world to guide health-related matters of international concern—would decide how governments could better prevent, prepare for, coordinate during, and respond to the next pandemic, and that it was historic.

It was all worth it, Gostin wrote:

So the expert on the IHR roster believed the IHRs that underpin any treaty, as well as the treaty, will “require governments to give up some of their ability to decide for themselves what they will do,” not to mention how much money they will spend.

That’s called giving up sovereignty.

Gostin was wrong, to be sure. Treaties, and only treaties ratified by the Senate, allow the nation to make certain obligations, but those obligations cannot breach the constitution or hamstring the actions the government takes under its constitutional responsibilities, dictate whom the government will work with, or make spending decisions. The constitution clearly makes Congress the ultimate authority on government spending, and no specific and temporal international edict on how the U.S. government will spend its tax dollars is valid.

Similarly, the federal government cannot delegate its legislative powers to outside entities (even though it is usually eager to give up its powers!). And neither can WHO edicts supersede the constitutional rights of American citizens, such as in the shuttering of churches, lockdowns and other oppressive measures the WHO believes it can impose. But that’s the way Gostin was thinking. He thought WHO could impose its will, and by regulations rather than treaty.

President Biden was thinking that way too, as he said in a statement:

So Biden was confessing there was a global rulebook. It may well be that those who say the regulations have no teeth are technically correct, and that states ignore them all the time, but clearly some of the more fervent backers of the rules, including the then president of the United States, envision a “global rulebook” in which nations “give up some of their ability to decide for themselves what they will do.”

This becomes especially critical because of the vertical integration of government bureaucracies. Even if elected leaders are not inclined to follow some global directives in a treaty or IHR, the vertical integration of health bureaucracies will make it much more difficult for them to resist the directive. In public health, vertical integration slides down the ladder from the WHO to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health to state and local health departments. Bureaucrats will be far more inclined to follow WHO directives than those of their own elected officials, and will try to resist efforts to prevent them from doing so.

They are often successful. For one thing, bureaucracies believe in bureaucrats—birds of a feather flock together—and live in a culture where they are inundated with propaganda that easily becomes groupthink. For another, many of the bureaucracies down the food chain are fed and powered by money from those up the ladder, buying loyalty and commitment, and they are often given grants with explicit strings attached. Even if there are no strings attached, lower level bureaucrats really do not like to incur the wrath of those higher up. Bureaucrats may be protected from elected officials by the civil service, but they are not protected from being eaten by their institutional parents.

Suffice it to say here that any WHO regulations would be far more binding under the treaty than many people like to admit, the language about being just “guidance” and “recommendations” notwithstanding. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the WHO global health cabal is encouraging, but the Trump administration will not be in power forever, or even in four years.

We need legislation now—while we still can—to require global health treaties to be fully debated and passed by a supermajority of elected representatives. The loophole must be closed. If we don’t, what would have been under a Harris administration could well be again if some Democratic Party globalist comes to power.

The Tiffany and Johnson WHO treaty bill accomplishes two very important things: It would protect American sovereignty and, even now, it offers up a free hands-on demonstration to Wisconsin Republicans about how to be authentic conservatives, not just wolves in sheeps’ clothing.