Submit the Paris Treaty to the Senate

The American Conservative covers the Paris Climate Agreement and CEI’s report on it by Marlo Lewis and Christopher Horner.

The so-called Paris “Treaty” has all sorts of grounds for complicated lawsuits to restrict America’s new found energy independence and growing massive natural-gas production. We need to get out from under it. Yet a weakened President Trump is hesitating while the global-warming lobby tries desperately to confound the issues.

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There is no question that the Paris Agreement was a treaty. Obama knew he would not get the votes in the Senate to pass it. The precedent of so committing America to such an agreement without a Senate vote should not be allowed to stand. A report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute lays out the reasons:

The Paris Climate Agreement is a treaty by virtue of its costs and risks, ambition compared to predecessor climate treaties, dependence on subsequent legislation by Congress, intent to affect state laws, U.S. historic practice with regard to multilateral environmental agreements, and other common-sense criteria.

CEI’s analysis further explains:

A majority of states have sued to overturn the Obama Environmental Protection Agency’s end-run around Congress, the Clean Power Plan, which is also the centerpiece of the U.S. NDC (nationally determined contributions) under the Paris Agreement. Yet, the CPP is only a start. All of Obama’s adopted and proposed climate policies would only achieve about 51 percent of just the first NDC, and the Paris Agreement requires parties to promise more “ambitious” NDCs every five years.

The Republican Senate will not vote to approve the treaty. That would end any case for its legal validity. Fear that a vote might be filibustered so that some future leftist administration could eventually resubmit it for ratification is bogus. In fact, it would be a constant thorn in the side of the Left for future elections. Remember another real motive for them is for Washington to have growing bureaucratic control over the states and citizenry. All sorts of new government powers could be claimed as a way of controlling climate change. Fears of this would give conservatives a constant election issue by keeping the issue alive.

Read the full article at The American Conservative.