President Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from what is arguably the world’s most important climate agreement, and the reaction everyone is having to this very precedented move is to call it “illegal,” proving once and for all that lawmakers are either remaining willfully delusional about a method of governance that flirts with authoritarianism, or they’ve just figured out the way to make it someone else’s problem.
Whatever the answer, the only person who ends up winning, as usual, is Donald Trump.
The UNFCCC, standing for United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is an international treaty adopted in 1992 to combat greenhouse emissions by providing an overall framework for action on global warming. Almost every country in the world is a party to it, and while it doesn’t set binding limits by itself, it has led to the signing of other major agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.
A week ago, Trump announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the UNFCCC, like it did with the Paris Agreement the day the 47th was sworn into office. This is a very destructive pattern for America, because not only does it signal to the world that international agreements are just suggestions the U.S. can ignore whenever it’s convenient, it also an indication that Trump is no longer afraid of legal consequences, a fear that compelled him to show a measure of restraint in his first term; a measure that has been alarmingly absent over the last year.
Now cue the experts.
Per The Guardian, the former head lawyer for the US state department has said that in his “legal opinion, he does not have the authority.” Another expert, Michael Gerrard of Columbia University, also asserts that since joining the UNFCCC was ratified by Congress in 1992, “there is an open question” about whether the president has the authority to exit it.
We are still missing the point
The rest of the article also entails legal experts and others of the same association bandying around legal jargon and using logical arguments with just a pinch of the applicable semantic fallacies to debate whether Donald Trump can do this or not.
Well, to these people, one should ask a few other questions of a more empirical nature.
Did Trump break the law when he invaded Venezuela on January 3 and abducted its president? Did he break the law when he signed the Birthright Citizenship Executive Order on January 20, which was challenged in court by dozens of states? What about the federal grant freeze? Or the mass firing of tens of thousands of federal employees? Or maybe the transgender military ban, or the decision to withdraw the U.S. from WHO, or the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which, according to several lawmakers including Rep. Jim Himes, was a “clear violation of the Constitution?”
You see, whether lawmakers or experts realize it or not, we seem to be in a self-perpetuating cycle of Trump doing whatever he wants, his MAGA enablers making sure to muddy the waters just enough so that he can get away with it, and the rest of the world desperately struggling to catch up to his latest stunt.
The playbook practically writes itself at this point, but I’ll spell it out for you just in case.
Step one: Trump does the thing everyone says he can’t do.
Step two: Legal experts write op-eds arguing why it’s unconstitutional.
Step three: Lawsuits get filed. (Probably already in the works involving UNFCCC.)
Step four: The cases wind through the courts for months or years.
Step five: By the time any court comes to a conclusion, the damage is done, and we’re all back to arguing about whatever new chaos Trump has unleashed.
The experts warning about legality aren’t wrong, per se, but they’re just unwittingly fighting in the wrong battle. Trump pulling out of the UNFCCC isn’t a legal problem; it’s a “who’s going to actually stop him” problem. And the answer to that question has been consistent over the past 10 years: absolutely nobody.
Someone might eventually try, but something tells me it’ll be too late for it to actually matter.
(featured image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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