"Enforce laws at your political leisure. Name recess appointments when there’s no recess. Legislate through regulation. Rewrite environmental laws. Rewrite immigration policy. Rewrite tax legislation. Bomb Libya. Bomb Syria. All by fiat. All good. The only question now is: what can’t Barack Obama do without Congress?
How about joining binding international agreements without the Senate’s consent? Also, good. The New York Times reports that Obama, who failed to pass sweeping domestic climate-change legislation in his first term, 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.”
Compel? That’s ok. Just ask Jonathan Chait, who argues that there are a number of reasons why the Senate’s consent isn’t really necessary. Mostly, though, when you really consider the “seriousness and urgency — you can’t un-melt a glacier — the broad way to think about climate politics is that Republicans have ceded the field completely.” Well yes, that’s definitely a broad way to think about any issue. A bit authoritarian, sure, but as the Constitution probably says somewhere, when you deem an issue super important, feel free to ignore the rest of this nonsense and do what’s “right.”
In this case, if an American fails to participate in environmental scaremongering, if he believes in human"...
