The Democrats Need to Do More Than Oppose Trump

Progressives have fallen into a familiar pattern early in Donald Trump’s presidency: wait for him to screw up, and then, depending on the severity of the offense, react with mockery or outrage. This applies to the trivial, as when Trump tweeted “Despite the negative press covfefe,” and to the consequential, as when he withdrew the United States last week from the Paris climate agreement.

In the latter instance, the outrage has spurred action: The same day as Trump’s announcement, a coalition of governors, mayors, university deans, and CEOs, led by Michael Bloomberg, pledged to keep America’s Paris commitments. “While the executive branch of the U.S. government speaks on behalf of our nation in matters of foreign affairs,” Bloomberg wrote in a letter to the United Nations secretary-general, “it does not determine many aspects of whether and how the United States takes action on climate change.” A separate group, of Democratic governors, has formed a similar alliance. “California will resist this misguided and insane course of action,” California Governor Jerry Brown said. “Trump is AWOL but California is on the field, ready for battle.”

Democrats have seized on Trump’s massive unpopularity to sell a powerful message not only against his disastrous presidency, but against a Republican Party that appears incapable of running the country. That a party entirely out of power in Washington would define itself in opposition to the majority is not surprising. Without the power to pass legislation, what more can Democrats do but rail against Trump and fight his efforts to undo President Barack Obama’s legacy? The answer: Democrats can push even more progressive policies than the ones they’re trying to save.

The downside of Obama’s success was that it made the left overconfident about the political future of the country: Progressivism’s ascent was unstoppable, it seemed, and the Democratic Party had a lock on the White House. That overconfidence bred complacency, at least among the party establishment and its base. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, meanwhile, argued that all was not well—and they were proven right when Hillary Clinton lost.

Trump is already one of the greatest unifiers of the American left in history. The clear and present danger of his presidency—his almost comically villainous cabinet, draconian budget, racist Muslim ban, egregious ethics violations and deepening Russia scandal—has led Democrats, whose intraparty squabbling dominated last year’s primaries, to form a united opposition both in Congress and on the streets. There have been mass marches for women, science, the environment, truth, and immigrants. The Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare, in particular, has ignited widespread progressive activism in the form of street protests, raucous town hall meetings, and overwhelmed congressional offices.

The Democratic base demands full-throated opposition to Trump, and it’s proven lucrative: Fundraising is through the roof. And the left is certainly energized in a way it never would have been under Clinton. Still, one has to wonder if this is the best way for the party to define itself. Opposition might be an easy sell and raise lots of money, but Democrats are missing an important opportunity to provide the country with an overarching policy vision for the future.

On climate change, for instance, Democrats shouldn’t settle on defending the Paris agreement, when the widespread consensus among climate scientists is that even Obama’s policies weren’t nearly enough for America to meet its commitments. Renewable energy is the only solution for the future, not just for saving the environment but also for job growth, and the United States is about to lose its mantle of leadership to China, so Democrats should propose even more aggressive policies to address these threats and spur economic growth.

The same goes with health care. As Republicans in Congress fight over the American Health Care Act, too many Democrats are still talking about saving Obamacare, when in fact this may be precisely the moment for them to be arguing for single payer. Even the CEO of one the largest health insurance companies in the country has said he’s open “to have that debate.” With so much attention being focused on the people who will lose coverage or see their premiums skyrocket under the AHCA, now is the time to make a bolder case for the kind of healthcare policy that would certainly address both of those issues convincingly.

Indeed, some on the left are doing just that. “[C]ast out of power in Washington and most state capitals, Democrats and activist leaders seeking political redemption have embraced an unlikely-seeming cause: an actual government takeover of health care,” The New York Times reported on Saturday. “At rallies and in town hall meetings, and in a collection of blue-state legislatures, liberal Democrats have pressed lawmakers, with growing impatience, to support the creation of a single-payer system.” While most House Democrats back a single-payer, Medicare-for-all bill, party leadership has balked at the idea. ““The comfort level with the broader base of the American people is not there yet,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said recently.

Republicans have long been experts on framing issues on their turf, moving the center of American politics rightward for several decades now. Democrats must take advantage of today’s Trumpian chaos to regain that ground with the kind of bold policy proposals that will not simply save Obama’s legacy, but build upon it. Just as Democrats assumed they could coast to victory with Clinton last year, the party complacently awaits Trump’s self-destruction. But that will not be enough to return to power in 2018 or 2020. Democrats need to convince voters that they will do more than just stop Trump—that they will govern responsibly and progressively. They need look no further than the current Republican Congress for proof that a party without a vision is not destined to succeed.

“While the executive branch of the U.S. government speaks on behalf of our nation in matters of foreign affairs,” Bloomberg wrote in a letter to the United Nations secretary-general, “it does not determine many aspects of whether and how the United States takes action on climate change.”

A separate group, of Democratic governors, has formed a similar alliance. “California will resist this misguided and insane course of action,” California Governor Jerry Brown said. “Trump is AWOL but California is on the field, ready for battle.” (per article)

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The president, for example, must be a “natural-born” citizen. As The Heritage Guide to the Constitution explains, this is because a “prime concern” of the Framers was that the government officer principally responsible for conducting foreign policy and commanding the armed forces have “undivided loyalty to the United States.”

This qualification, like the Senate supermajority required for treaty approval, was meant to be a check on presidential subordination of the national interest to foreign concerns. The Constitution, moreover, does not stop with the president.

The states, though sovereign, are expressly forbidden from entering into treaties; and unless Congress consents, they may not even enter lesser agreements with foreign powers. Again, the point is to assure the primacy of American national interest. To coin a phrase, our fundamental law is “America first.” Thus, transnational progressives must scheme to circumvent it.

Such stratagems include pretending that a treaty is not a treaty and, just as insidiously, pretending that a presidentially signed treaty is the functional equivalent of a presidentially ratified treaty. The latter artifice, as I’ve previously outlined, relies on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

It claims to bind nations to treaties they have merely signed, or to which they’ve otherwise signaled assent. Even though such an international agreement has not been ratified under the nation’s laws, this treaty on treaties purports to oblige the nation “to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.” I say “claims” and “purports” advisedly. The United States has never ratified this convention, either. The treaty on treaties should thus be inconsequential — just as the Paris agreement should. But the State Department, the U.S. government’s transnational-progressive headquarters, claims America is nonetheless bound under the vaporous corpus of “customary international law.”

That’s a big part of the game, too. You are expected to accept that the Constitution may be amended — or is it evolved? — by international law. Of course, the United States Congress may not enact an unconstitutional statute, the president may not decree an unconstitutional order, and an American court may not issue an unconstitutional ruling. Yet somehow, when the largely anti-American “international community” makes a political decision and slaps the label “law” on it, voilà, the Constitution melts away.

Thus it was that President Obama signed the Paris Convention, and the international community declared that Americans were duly bound, notwithstanding that our law requires Senate consent.

This is why President Trump needed not just to reject the climate agreement, but to take the affirmative step of withdrawing the United States from it. What is outrageous, however, is the presumption under which the public debate has ensued. It has never entered the discussion that the Paris pact, which would profoundly damage our economy, has never even been submitted to the Senate, much less approved by the two-thirds supermajority that is supposed to protect us from bad deals. It was just a few days ago that the Fourth Circuit’s transnational progressive jurists told us that the majesty of the Constitution forbids the president from barring potentially threatening aliens from entering our country. How is it, then, that an explicit mandate in the actual Constitution — rather than the Constitution the judges make up as they go along — is nullified? President Trump says he’s all about draining the swamp.

Well, the swamp runneth over with signed but unratified treaties that the Left maintains impose stifling obligations and international pieties on Americans. We’ve never voted for them, and our elected representatives have never voted to approve them. Yet our own government, whose officers swear to defend the Constitution, tells us we are bound. The president should formally withdraw the United States from every single one.

It would be a bold empowerment of a self-determining republic, and it would not prevent any of these treaties from being adopted, as long as this was done in the manner dictated by the Constitution. You want America First? That would be America First.

And unlike the congressional cat-herding that has thwarted the reforms of Obamacare, tax policy, and border enforcement, the president wouldn’t need 60 votes. As the Paris withdrawal reminds us, he just needs one. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448248/trump-paris-convention-constitution
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