Obama begins to doubt if the bloke in the mirror gives good advice
The rise of UKIP with yet another MP is going to make UK politics interesting, however the big news on the climate today is that President Obama says he is intending to use executive powers to bypass congress and the senate. I cannot understand how this is possible and as such it looks to me that he will inevitably get impeached.
For those who don’t know, the US have a “republican constitution”. This is the same as the UK and Rome. In this constitution there are three groups:
- 1. The monarchical leader (President/monarch/emperor)
- The house of the rich/landed gentry/oligarchs (Senate/House of Lords)
- The house of the plebs (commons/congress).
There are these three groups each fighting with the other for power and the rules under which this battle is fought is the US constitution. So when Obama said he was going to bypass the senate and congress and do something to reduce atmospheric plant food, I wondered how the US constitutional permitted this.
It appears the relevant provision is the “executive order”. However such an order is not part of the US constitution. Instead the enactment of the provision that the president is the “executive officer”.
The term “executive power” Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution, refers to the title of President as the executive. He is instructed therein by the declaration “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” made in Article II, Section 3, Clause 5, else he faces impeachment.
An executive order of the President must find support in the Constitution, either in a clause granting the President specific power, or by a delegation of power by Congress to the President. (wakopedia)
There will be no specific power in the constitution over the atmosphere for obvious reasons. There is no urgent and pressing reason to act now rather than in another decade, so there is no provision under any powers regarding emergency. There is no reason why the normal processes of the constitution should not prevail – except that Obama sees that due process under the constitution as not permitting him to act as he wishes.
CO2 is like water. Both are necessary for life and both raise the temperature of the earth above the cold frozen waste it would be without greenhouse gases. Natural variation is a known fact. As the pause demonstrates, even if the academic predictions were true, natural variation must be as strong as these academic predictions to have caused no net change in temperature for the last 18 years. This shows that in the millions of years of earth’s history such changes in temperature as we see today will be very very common (and obviously they are because we know there were ice ages).
There is no argument supporting urgent action. There is no argument supporting a compulsion to act. The “experts” who Obama cites for action have been thoroughly discredited not only by the fact they completely failed to predict the pause, but because their failure to predict the pause shows they are delusional to be very confidence that they understand why temperatures have changed. And let’s not forget that almost none of their predictions of trends in extreme weather would stand up to scrutiny in a court of law.
To talk about the US constitution allowing the president to control CO2 is as senseless as suggesting the US constitution allows him to have a “war on rain”, because atmospherically they are very very similar: both necessary for life on earth and both greenhouse gases.
So, unless there is a specific law that has already been passed which specifically mentions “CO2” and specifically empowers the president to act, Obama will be clearly acting Ultra Vires and unless the US politicians are entirely stupid, he will be impeached.
