Senator Ted Cruz has an excellent essay in the Harvard Law Review Forum entitled Limits on the Treaty Power. Here is a taste:
The Necessary and Proper Clause does not give Congress power to implement treaties in a way that contravenes the structural limitations on the federal government’s powers …. The President should not be able to make any treaty — and Congress should not be able to implement any treaty — in a way that displaces the sovereignty reserved to the states or to the people.
Cruz thus argues that Justice Holmes’s opinion in Missouri v. Holland must be limited to its facts, or else overruled. Regular readers know that I entirely agree.
It is quite unusual for a sitting senator to publish original legal scholarship. And it is doubly unusual for a senator to, in effect, argue for constitutional limits on his own power. Read the whole thing.