Kudos to the administration for withdrawing from part of a treaty that gives the World Court effective jurisdiction over immigrants in our domestic criminal justice system. Unfortunately, the main treaty, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, still creates sovereignty problems. Article 36 of the Convention requires that foreigners who are arrested must be informed of their right to contact a consular officer from their country. This is a common-sense measure I like to call the “Midnight Express” rule, and it protects Americans from rotting unknown in Turkish, or other, jails. But when combined with the reality of mass Mexican immigration, it exposes every local criminal justice system to co-management by the Mexican government, in the most intimate and permanent fashion. And criminal defense attorneys have been cooperating, trying for years to raise the Vienna Convention notification to the level of a Miranda warning, so that evidence would be excluded and convictions overturned in its absence. We aren’t at that point yet, and the State Department’s decision yesterday is a heartening development, but the danger clearly exists. Maybe the potential of such a sweeping loss of sovereignty is worth reducing the price of lettuce by a nickel a head, but I would have to vote no.