# Goldwater v. Carter **Status: stub — expand.** Supreme Court disposition of **December 13, 1979** (444 U.S. 996) arising from President Carter's unilateral termination of the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty with Taiwan as a condition of normalizing relations with Beijing. Senator [[Barry Goldwater]] and twenty-four other members of Congress sued, arguing that a treaty entered with the Senate's ⅔ advice and consent could not be ended without some legislative role. **The Court never answered.** It vacated the D.C. Circuit's judgment and ordered the complaint dismissed, with **no majority opinion**: four justices (Rehnquist, plurality) called treaty termination a nonjusticiable political question; Powell concurred on ripeness grounds, saying the Senate had not yet formally confronted the President; Brennan alone reached the merits for the President. The result is the central hole in the American treaty system. The Constitution specifies exactly how the United States **enters** a treaty and says nothing whatsoever about how it **leaves** one, and the one case that could have settled the question produced no holding. Every subsequent unilateral withdrawal — the ABM Treaty (2002), the [[JCPOA]] (2018), the [[Paris Agreement]], and the January 2026 mass withdrawal that reached the Senate-ratified UNFCCC — has proceeded into that vacuum. ## See also - [[How a Treaty Is Made and Ratified]] - [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]] - [[United States Senate]] - [[Barry Goldwater]]