RUTHFULLY YOURS

Do you remember this bit from the Constitution of the United States?

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; . . . 

That’s the so-called “Treaty Clause” from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution.  It is one of several checks on executive power thoughtfully provided by the Founders but flouted by the Golfer-in-Chief currently occupying the White House.

Can’t get two-thirds of the Senate to approve a bit of Green Legislation you favor?  No problem!  Just pretend that the United States of America is subject not to its Constitution but to the transnational organization of gangsters, kleptocracies, and Third-World dictatorships known as the Untied Nations.

Sound extreme? We can talk about the composition of the Untied Nations another time.  But when it comes to Barack Obama’s cavalier treatment of the Constitution, you need look no further than this morning’s New York Times. Under the headline “Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty,” ^[1] the paper explains how the president, frustrated by Congress’s unwillingness to barter away U.S. sovereignty by signing on to the so-called “Kyoto Protocol ^[2],” the economy blighting climate standards devised by Greenies and other folks eager to hamstring the world’s most productive economies, especially the Untied States, is planning to “sidestep” Congress.

It’s written in soporific journalese, but it is an explosive story:

The Obama administration is working to forge a sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions, but without ratification from Congress.

In preparation for this agreement, to be signed at a United Nations summit meeting in 2015 in Paris, the negotiators are meeting with diplomats from other countries to broker a deal to commit some of the world’s largest economies to enact laws to reduce their carbon pollution. But under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.

To sidestep that requirement, President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions.

I’ve highlighted a few passages for special consideration. I invite you to ponder in particular the conjunction of these two nuggets: 1.) “under the Constitution, a president may enter into a legally binding treaty only if it is approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate”; and 2. “To sidestep that requirement, . . . .” In other words, even the New York Times is onto the extra-Constitutional, i.e., the illegal, activities of the Obama administration.  Do they care? Do you?

The proposed “deal,” as the Times goes on to say, “is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.”

“The only realistic path”: what do you suppose that means? The only way that the Obama administration and these  unnamed “negotiators,” i.e. Greenie activists, can circumvent national sovereignty and the will of the people and impose their eco-nutty agenda on an unwilling world.

In fact, I suspect the chances of any such agreement meeting with the approval of China and India, let alone those struggling “poor countries” that the Times contemptuously heaped together with “Republicans on Capitol Hill,” are approximately nil. Indeed, even if they signed on to any such agreement, they would contrive to evade its requirements.  But all that is secondary to Obama’s effort to stymie U.S. productivity and blight its prosperity. It’s part of his announced effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America ^[3].” The only question is whether We, the People of the United States are going to sit back and let it happen.  A parting thought from Richard Weaver: “The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.”