congressional-executive agreement

congressional-executive agreement, binding agreement between the United States and a foreign country that is easier to enact than a formal treaty but is technically more limited in scope.

Although both treaties and congressional-executive agreements are international agreements, the two are legally distinct instruments. For instance, congressional-executive agreements cannot address matters that are outside the scope of the enumerated powers of Congress and the president (those powers expressly granted to Congress and the president in Article I, Section 8, and in Article II, Section 2, respectively, of the U.S. Constitution), whereas treaties can. In addition, according to the Constitution, a treaty is ratified only if at least two-thirds of the Senate votes in favour of it. By contrast, a congressional-executive agreement becomes binding with only a simple majority in both houses of Congress. Congressional-executive agreements should not be confused with executive agreements, which are concluded by the president alone.

In part because the enumerated powers of Congress and the president have been interpreted broadly, most agreements that are proposed as treaties could also have been proposed as congressional-executive agreements. For that reason, the U.S. government has frequently chosen to use congressional-executive agreements rather than treaties for controversial agreements that are unlikely to gain the required supermajority in the Senate. Examples of contentious proposals addressed in the form of congressional-executive agreements include the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the agreement whereby the United States became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.