Sen. Kelly Ayotte has helped torpedo the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), and for that all Granite Staters can be thankful.

Ayotte, a member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, joined Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio on Monday in signing a letter to Senate President Harry Reid stating their opposition to the treaty.

In the letter, Ayotte and Portman wrote, “we are deeply concerned about the treaty’s depth and ambiguity, the inadequate U.S. input in the treaty’s adjudicative bodies, and the automatic enforcements of tribunal judgments in the United States.”

The treaty is long and complicated (which is bad in itself), but in a nutshell it would subject United States maritime activities to the governance of an international body that would use its regulatory power to weaken our position on the high seas; it would make judgments of the governing tribunal automatically binding in the United States; it would make U.S. companies more susceptible to foreign lawsuits; and it would regulate the pursuit of natural resources off of our coast.

Ayotte correctly judged that trading these important bits of U.S. sovereignty for a clarification of our navigational rights was a bad trade.

Her opposition means that the treaty is dead this year. That is good news. But there is always next year. Granite Staters concerned about giving away important aspects of our national sovereignty ought to ask Sen. Jeanne Shaheen why she is not one of the senators to come out against this bad treaty.