Abdul El-Sayed Is Another Socialist Who Loves 'International Law'

Abdul El-Sayed keeps talking about "international law" like it's some higher court America answers to, and that word choice tells you more than any policy paper could. He's not alone. Mamdani does it. A good chunk of the DSA crowd does it. It's become a kind of shorthand for people who'd rather borrow legitimacy from The Hague than win the argument in front of American voters.

Here's the thing that never gets said plainly enough: the International Criminal Court has no authority over the United States. We never ratified the Rome Statute. Congress didn't sign off on it, and no American president has ever treated its rulings as binding. So when a politician leans on "international law" as the moral backstop for domestic or foreign policy, he's not citing law at all. He's citing a wish list dressed up in legal language, hoping nobody checks the footnotes.

There's also something a little convenient about which international bodies these guys cite and which they ignore. Nobody in this crowd is rushing to enforce international law when it comes to, say, border sovereignty or trade enforcement. It shows up mainly when it can be used to constrain American power specifically, which is a strange kind of internationalism if you think about it.

The Constitution set up a system where Americans govern themselves through elections, courts, and a Congress that answers to voters, not a panel in Geneva or New York with no skin in the game. If El-Sayed wants to run on socialism, fine, that's a debate worth having openly. But smuggling it in under the banner of international law is just a way of avoiding the argument he'd actually have to win at home.