In a tough hearing preceding her certain confirmation, Secretary of State-designee Condoleezza Rice upset conservatives when she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that President Bush wants the Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) this year. "We would certainly like to see it pass as soon as possible," Rice told Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar (R.-Ind.), the Senate's leading champion of the treaty.
LOST has remained unratified by the United States since President Ronald Reagan rejected it in 1982 as an attack on U.S. sovereignty. As Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, pointed out in testimony before the House International Relations Committee last April, LOST creates an unelected global governing agency called the International Seabed Authority that claims "the exclusive right to regulate what is done, by whom, when and under what circumstances on and beneath the sea-floor in international waters."
