At the Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change
Conference in New York this weekend, I gave a talk
addressing the argument made by Brookings’ Nigel Purvis that,
when it comes to roping the U.S. into Kyoto’s successor, we need
to recognize that “The United States should classify new
international treaties to protect the Earth’s climate system as
executive agreements rather than treaties”, because “The treaty
clause has never worked as the framers of the Constitution
intended.”
By that really he means, upon clarification, that “The treaty
process created by the framers of the Constitution requires an
exceptional degree of national consensus that is no longer
reasonable given the frequency and importance of international
cooperation today”, or, translated, that that which was intended
to keep us from doing something too promiscuously has been
overtaken by the practice of doing it too promiscuously and must
be thrown overboard.
Kyoto II therefore should just be an executive agreement
requiring 50-plus-1 “fast tracking” in both houses of Congress,
not two-thirds Senate ratification.
Now, to be accurate and in apology to the tremendous audience
which packed the room for our panel, in my haste to pull up the
file and remove from it a few slides that I saw being covered by
Marc Morano speaking before me, I actually gave a version of my 8
minute CPAC talk the week before - the correct, more in-depth
treatment of the issue is the version which will be posted.
This talk tracked a piece
I had in the February Engage of the Federalist Society.
I have had Kyotophiles raise their hands the moment I raise this
issue, aah-aah-aah! a la Kramer of “Seinfeld”, firmly
instructing me that no one is really thinking about such
things don’t raise them don’t raise them I don’t hear you,
etc.
As that could indicate, this isn’t an issue that they find
helpful to raise in advance of whatever’s going to be done being
done.
So it is with interest that I read a paper for Team Soros, the
Center for American Progress, sent to me by someone in the
audience and titled “A Changing Climate: The Road Ahead for the
United States”, making the same points made by Purvis, offering
the same prescription and on the same grounds of restoring our
credibility and so on.
It’s full of pap about the U.S. having muzzled its scientists,
cites hyper-alarmist and Obama nominee to be of all things
chief science advisor John Holdren for propositions of a
catastrophically warming world and the like, but is most
intriguing for this:
The United States’ own ratification process meanwhile presents
special challenges. Ratifying a treaty is much tougher than
passing domestic legislation, both because the Senate is
classically hostile to requirements imposed by outside bodies
such as the UN and because it requires 67 votes rather than the
51 required for domestic legislation or even the 60 required to
break a filibuster. Even if a U.S. domestic cap-and-trade
system were enacted, ratifying a treaty could be difficult,
especially if the treaty required changes to elements of the
domestic system, as it well might.
The obvious solution in the face of such meanies getting in your
way by adhering to the Constitution when you’ve got a revolution
to carry out is of course the congressional-executive agreement
suggested by Purvis. The authors? “Todd Stern…senior fellow at
the Center for American Progress and a partner at WilmerHale in
Washington, D.C. [and] William Antholis … managing director of
the Brookings Institution.”
Stern is of course the new “climate envoy” for the United States,
the apparent voice of reason downplaying the idea of U.S.
involvement in some grand Kyoto 2.0 treaty (credit for which
apparent realism I give him in a Human
Events piece from yesterday).
So it’s unclear which Stern is at work, but at least we do know
that he, too, harbors aspirations of finding an end-run around
the Constitution’s troublesome two-thirds Senate approval
requirement. It’s pretty clear that this is in fact the Party
Line. Maybe it’s ok to talk about it now?
