Calling Obama's Bluff on Climate Change

From Steven Hayward, at WSJ, "The president is threatening to bypass Congress and sign an international treaty. Here’s how to box him in":

From immigration to Internet regulation, there is scarcely an issue on which President Obama has not pushed the limits of executive power to achieve his ideological goals. The Republican Congress has been able only to react to these usurpations, often floundering, as seen in the recent debacle over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Is there a way the GOP Congress can get ahead of Mr. Obama?

This question is especially salient with respect to climate change, as Mr. Obama has indicated that he intends, at the next United Nations climate-change summit to be held this November in Paris, to bypass Congress once again and settle on a “politically binding” climate agreement that he would implement through executive action. This is very different from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was regarded as a formal treaty that would have required Senate ratification to take effect. President Clinton never submitted Kyoto to the Senate for a vote: His own council of economic advisers told him it was an economic nonstarter.

This episode is relevant today. Before Vice President Al Gore embarked for Kyoto, the Senate voted 95-0 for a resolution warning the Clinton administration not to sign an asymmetrical deal that would disproportionately harm the U.S. economy. But that is exactly what Mr. Gore bought back from negotiations. Note that those voting for the resolution included climate-change true believers such as Barbara Boxer and John Kerry.

The basic international economics of greenhouse-gas reduction hasn’t changed in 20 years, and any new U.N. agreement is sure to be Kyoto revisited. Today’s Senate Democrats are so far gone into climate-change hysteria that they would never vote for the kind of resolution that passed in 1997. But GOP legislators might have other options to constrain Mr. Obama’s diplomacy...

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