President Treaty-Making Power

President Treaty-Making Power and the Senate

The plan that the Committee of Detail reported to the Federal Convention on August 6, 1787 provided that “the Senate of the United States shall have power to make treaties, and to appoint Ambassadors, and Judges of the Supreme Court.” 1 Not until September 7, ten days before the Convention's final adjournment, was the President made a participant in these powers.2 The constitutional clause evidently assumes that the President and Senate will be associated throughout the entire process of making a treaty, although Jay, writing in The Federalist, foresaw that the initiative must often be seized by the President without benefit of senatorial counsel.3 Yet, so late as 1818 Rufus King, Senator from New York, who had been a member of the Convention, declared on the floor of the Senate: “In these concerns the Senate are the Constitutional and the only responsible counselors of the President. And in this capacity the Senate may, and ought to, look into and watch over every branch of the foreign affairs of the nation; they may, therefore, at any time call for full and exact information respecting the foreign affairs, and express their opinion and advice to the President respecting the same, when, and under whatever other circumstances, they may think such advice expedient.” 4

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References

This text about President Treaty-Making Power is based on “The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation”, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

Notes

[Footnote 1] 2 M. FARRAND, THE RECORDS OF THE FEDERAL CONVENTION OF 1787 183 (rev. ed. 1937).

[Footnote 2] Id. at 538-39.

[Footnote 3] No. 64 (J. Cooke ed., 1961), 435-436.

[Footnote 4] 31 ANNALS OF CONGRESS 106 (1818).