Trump Will Withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Good.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448133/paris-climate-agreement-iran-nuclear-deal-unratified-treaties-trump-should-leave?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-05-31&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives"Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement has come under strong criticism as a costly, ineffective, and economically harmful approach to addressing alleged global warming. But there’s something else these agreements have in common: Both are treaties, but were deliberately negotiated by the Obama administration in a way that enabled it to evade the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that treaties be ratified by the Senate.
America’s Founding Fathers placed a high threshold to ratify treaties: two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favor. The reason is that treaties are major international agreements that legally bind our nation and its presidents long into the future. No president should have the power to make such commitments with just the stroke of his pen.
Meanwhile, the Paris Agreement has come under strong criticism as a costly, ineffective, and economically harmful approach to addressing alleged global warming. But there’s something else these agreements have in common: Both are treaties, but were deliberately negotiated by the Obama administration in a way that enabled it to evade the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that treaties be ratified by the Senate. America’s Founding Fathers placed a high threshold to ratify treaties: two-thirds of the Senate must vote in favor. The reason is that treaties are major international agreements that legally bind our nation and its presidents long into the future. No president should have the power to make such commitments with just the stroke of his pen.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy explained this in an April 2015 NRO article, writing that the Constitution “does not empower the president to make binding agreements with foreign countries all on his own — on the theory that the American people should not take on enforceable international obligations or see their sovereignty compromised absent approval by the elected representatives most directly accountable to them.”
Supporters of the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement argue that there is no clear definition of what constitutes a treaty. They also note that presidents frequently enter into major international agreements without submitting them for ratification by the Senate.
While these arguments have merit, they do not apply to the JCPOA and the Paris Agreement, because these are important pacts that have been treated like treaties by most other states. The Iranian Parliament ratified the JCPOA. The legislatures of over 128 Paris Agreement signatories have ratified that agreement, including those of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the U.K."