Law Prof.: Obama’s Climate Agenda Is About Changing The Constitution

President Barack Obama’s push to unilaterally commit the United States to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions in the coming years is about changing the constitutional system that similarly hampered former President Bill Clinton’s global warming goals, according to a law professor.

In a congressional hearing Thursday, George Mason University law professor Jeremy Rabkin told lawmakers that Obama’s argument that he unilaterally commit the U.S. to a United Nations agreement without Senate ratification was “a real change in our Constitution.”

“So, now we’re going to have some body, in some entity, in some foreign country that’s going to be directing us?” Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions asked Rabkin during Thursday’s hearing on Obama’s emissions-reduction promise to the United Nations.

“We have certain background assumptions about how our government is supposed to work, that’s why we have a Constitution,” Rabkin responded.

“And what this is fundamentally about is saying, ‘ah, that’s old-fashioned, forget that, that didn’t work for [President Bill] Clinton– we’re moving forward with something different which the president gets to commit us,’” Rabkin added. “That’s a real change in our Constitution.”

Late last year, Obama committed the U.S. to cut CO2 emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. Obama made the pledge in conjunction with China’s government, which promised to merely peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. Republicans immediately came out against Obama’s pledge, saying it was unworkable and they wouldn’t ratify it.

The threat of Senate opposition successfully scared Clinton into abandoning his plan to get lawmakers to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s, but the Obama administration is arguing its international climate pledge doesn’t even need congressional approval.

The U.S. submitted a document to the UN last year that suggested a “bifurcated approach” to a deal on global warming. The president says it is not a treaty the Senate needs to ratify, as it requires every country to submit individual CO2-reduction promises they will use domestic policies to achieve.

Obama wants to make signing a global climate deal part of his presidential legacy, but knows such an agreement would never be ratified by a Republican-controlled Senate. Therefore, the administration is doing everything it can to argue a UN deal would not need lawmakers’ approval.

Here’s the problem, though: Any promise made by Obama to the international community on this scale would likely need to be ratified by the Senate in order to be considered a treaty, according to Rabkin.

“The word treaty is usually reserved for things that are ratified by the Senate,” he told lawmakers.

Via: Daily Caller

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Examiner Editorial: Politically connected banks got bigger bailouts

It should come as no surprise that politically connected banks received larger bailout loans from the federal government during the 2007 financial crisis than banks that spent less on lobbying and campaign contributions. That's the conclusion of a new analysis by Prof. Benjamin Blau of Utah State University. His findings were based on data from the Federal Reserve and published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Blau noted it was “unlikely" that the Fed intended "to provide political favors to banks with the most political connections.” But whatever the motive, the pattern was stark. Banks that received bailout loans spent 72 times more on lobbying in the decade before the meltdown than banks that got no loans. Blau also found that 15 percent of the banks that received loans employed politically connected individuals. Only 1.5 percent of banks with politically connected employees got no loans.

There are three potential reasons for the skew, as Blau indicates:

1. The Fed may simply have had more information on the politically active banks, which would have made it easier to approve the loans.

2. The politically active banks were probably more likely to seek Fed loans.

3. Because of their political sophistication, these banks may have taken greater risks believing they would be rescued by the Fed if anything went wrong.

Following the 2007 crisis, Congress passed Dodd-Frank, a massive tome of a bill that Americans were told would prevent a repeat of the financial meltdown. In fact, Dodd-Frank all but guarantees that big banks stay big and small banks struggle to compete. “Dodd-Frank has not done enough to coral ‘too big to fail’ banks and, on balance, the act has made things worse, not better,” said Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Via: Washington Examiner

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