Paris Accord: Promise Made, Promise Kept

Uncle Sugar doesn’t live here any more, and he didn’t leave a forwarding address. This is the message, spoken loud and clear by Donald Trump Thursday in the White House Rose Garden, and it’s just now getting through to the easy riders out there.

“As of today,” he said, “the United States will cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. We’re getting out but we’ll start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.”

This was exactly what the 196 signers needed to hear, and the president told them without heat, bombast or blather. Just the facts, ma’am, and that means Madame Merkel. Before all the news from Washington was in, Madame Merkel, with France and Italy tagging along in the lady’s considerable wake, said in haughty voice that the Paris accord “will not be renegotiated.” So the lady says, subject to invoking the feminine privilege of changing her mind.

In ditching Paris deal, Trump does right by America and the world

In quitting the Paris Accord, President Trump on Thursday did nothing to shift the course of US environmental policy — not even on carbon emissions. But he did put the world on notice that no president can unilaterally commit this nation to such far-reaching agreements.

The Constitution is clear: No treaty is binding on the US government unless ratified by the Senate. That tanked the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 anti-warming treaty that the Senate rejected 95-0. And it would’ve killed the Paris deal that President Obama signed in 2016 — except that his negotiators shaped an “agreement” that wouldn’t go to the Senate.

But one that still would’ve been used to rewrite US law, if the courts went along. (And a President Hillary Clinton’s judicial picks would have ensured that they did.)