Barack Obama subjected the United States to the Paris climate treaty by executive order since it was unlikely that the U.S. Senate would ratify a treaty requiring a “massive, painful transformation” of the American economy.
Entire industries of electricity generation, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and more would change.
But China, which was classified as a “developing” economy under the deal, was exempt from those requirements.
So President Trump simply pulled the U.S. out of the deal.
Joe Biden has promised to re-enter the deal, but a report at Climate Depot suggests a way for President Trump to throw a roadblock in front of Biden.
“Mr. Trump could and should submit the treaty to the Senate for its advice and consent – and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should quickly schedule a debate and vote. Every Senator will have an opportunity to go on record: for or against a treaty that would make the United States, and every individual state and family, subjects of unelected, unaccountable U.N. and foreign powers,” the report recommended.
“President Trump should do this posthaste – thereby preventing another unilateral executive action and what Government Accountability & Oversight lawyer Chris Horner has described as a well-coordinated ‘climate litigation industry’ plan to commandeer our courts in an endless series of lawsuits to make every Paris Climate Treaty provision legally binding on every U.S. state, industry, business and family,” it continued.
It is Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution that allows the president to “make treaties” if he has the “consent of the Senate.”
When the U.N. in 2015 hammered out the Paris accord demands that nations slash their fossil fuel use and other greenhouse gas emissions, Obama simply decreed that the accord was merely an agreement and not a treaty.
He could sign an “agreement” but it was an “end-run around our constitutional and democratic process,” the report said.
It gave Congress “no opportunity to examine, discuss and agree to or reject this intrusive, destructive treaty.”
By way of that deal, the report said, Obama “set the stage for coordinated efforts by liberal politicians, activists, bureaucrats, state attorneys general, forum-shopped judges and corporate CEOs to make the Paris language binding on every American.”
The precedent set by Obama, the report argued, “would imperil American self-government – by empowering administrations to make long-term commitments without congressional authorization, and by making U.S. energy and economic policies beholden to the demands of foreign leaders, U.N. bureaucrats and international pressure groups.”
But if the Senate already had rejected the terms, any American president would face an uphill battle trying to impose in on the nation, the report suggested.
This article appeared originally on WND.
