How Treaties Are Ratified: The Senate's Role in Foreign Policy
A two-thirds Senate vote sounds like a high bar for any international commitment. In practice, presidents route most agreements around it entirely, and understanding why explains a great deal about how American foreign policy actually gets made.
Published July 6, 2026The Constitution gives the president power to make treaties, but only "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate," and only if two-thirds of senators present agree. This is a deliberately high bar, higher than the simple majority needed for ordinary legislation, and it reflects the framers' concern that binding the country to foreign obligations should require unusually broad political consensus rather than a narrow partisan majority pushing an agreement through on its own.
The ratification process itself
A treaty negotiated and signed by the executive branch does not take effect until the Senate approves it, and the Senate's role is not merely a yes-or-no vote — it can attach reservations, understandings, or conditions that modify how the United States will interpret or apply specific provisions, effectively rewriting parts of the deal before consenting to it. Once the Senate consents, the president still has to formally ratify the treaty by exchanging or depositing ratification documents with the other party or parties; Senate approval and final ratification are technically two separate steps, though the second is largely a formality once the first has happened.
Treaties can also die quietly. A president is not obligated to submit a signed treaty to the Senate at all, and treaties have sat in the Senate for years or even decades without ever coming to a vote, effectively left in limbo rather than formally rejected. This gives presidents a degree of control over the process even before the constitutional two-thirds requirement comes into play.
Executive agreements: the far more common route
The vast majority of international agreements the United States enters into are not treaties in the constitutional sense at all — they are executive agreements, made under the president's own foreign affairs authority or under authority already delegated by an existing statute, and they do not require Senate ratification. Some executive agreements do go to Congress for approval by simple majority in both chambers rather than the Senate's two-thirds threshold, a category sometimes called congressional-executive agreements, which has become the standard vehicle for major trade agreements specifically because it avoids the treaty clause's higher bar.
This distinction is not a minor technicality; it is the primary reason presidents have so much practical latitude in foreign affairs despite the Senate's formal treaty power. An agreement that would struggle to reach two-thirds support in a closely divided Senate can often be structured as an executive agreement instead, sidestepping the constitutional check almost entirely. Courts have generally upheld this practice, though scholars continue to debate where the line should sit between legitimate executive authority and an end run around the Senate's intended role.
Why the framers set the bar so high
The two-thirds threshold reflects a specific worry from the founding era: that a bare majority, or a single faction, could commit the country to entangling foreign alliances or unfavorable terms without truly national buy-in. Alexander Hamilton defended the treaty power's design in the Federalist Papers as a middle path between giving the president unchecked authority over foreign commitments and handing that power entirely to a legislature poorly suited to fast-moving diplomacy. In practice, the threshold has proven high enough that a number of significant treaties, including some arms control and international convention agreements, have failed to reach ratification even with majority Senate support, because reaching a supermajority across a divided chamber is a genuinely difficult political task.
The lasting tension
The result is a system where the president leads foreign policy day to day, formal treaties represent the small subset of international commitments that clear an intentionally high bar, and executive agreements fill nearly all the space in between. That balance shifts depending on how assertive a given Congress chooses to be about demanding a role in step with its broader confirmation power over nominees, but the underlying constitutional structure — presidential initiative checked by a supermajority Senate requirement that applies only to formal treaties — has remained essentially unchanged since the founding.