International obligations bypass domestic opposition—“backdoor lawmaking” presents a fait accompli to holdouts.
Yu 15 (Peter K. Yu, Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law, founding director of the Intellectual Property Law Center, Drake University Law School; "The Non-multilateral Approach to International Intellectual Property Normsetting", in International Intellectual Property: A Handbook of Contemporary Research, p. 83-120, January 2015, Texas A&M Law Scholarship, https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1009/, DOA: 6-28-2024)//ATJ
Even worse, the lack of accountability and the political payoffs of a successful international agreement may tempt politicians to engage in what I have called ‘backdoor lawmaking’ – ‘a process of outsourcing the legislative process to an international forum of unelected representatives in an effort to create laws that the domestic legislature would not have otherwise enacted’.57 Through this backdoor process, the administration can present to the legislature a fait accompli in an attempt to make an end run around the domestic deliberative process. The new-found international obligation will greatly increase the likelihood of having the laws enacted, even though those laws would not have been enacted based on evaluation of local needs alone. After all, when the country’s international reputation is on the line, the stakes in not adopting laws to implement the agreement are much higher.