Joe Biden has made no secret of his intention to get us back into the Paris climate accords. It’s high up there on his laundry list of things to do upon taking office—even though the United States leads the world in reducing carbon emissions, despite not being a part of it anymore.
But the truth is, the United States was never actually legally a part of the Paris climate accords. The United Nations describes it as “a legally binding international treaty on climate change,” and it also meets the definition of a treaty under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which states that a treaty is “an international agreement concluded between [two or more] States in written form and governed by international law.”
And what does the United States Constitution say about treaties?
It says that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It’s right there in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2.
Yes, Obama unilaterally signed the United States into the treaty in the final months of his presidency, which was a very telling move. Nearly 200 countries signed the treaty on December 12, 2015, but Obama didn’t sign it until nearly a year later, during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election. Obama, who fancied himself a constitutional scholar, never even attempted to go to the Senate for ratification. Instead, he avoided referring to the agreement as a treaty publicly, in order to argue that Senate ratification wasn’t constitutionally mandated.
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