Last evening (Thursday) Mike Lee—one of the 22 Republican senators who sent a letter to President Trump recommending withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement—was interviewed on PBS. As you might expect, he asserted with a great show of solemnity that Trump’s decision was “the right thing to do” at least twice during the interview.
But what I didn’t quite expect was that the first thing out of his mouth was not about the Paris accord itself, nor was it about climate or jobs or the economy—no, it was about the way Obama had drawn the U.S. into the agreement without the consent of the Senate (as he, or course, had every right to do).
And there it was. . . another surfacing of the anti-Obama toxin that has steadily dripped through the veins of the Republican Party ever since 2008. If the Paris Agreement had been entered into by a President McCain or President Romney, do you think it would have taken such a pounding from Mike Lee, or any other of the Republican senators who have defied common sense and the will of the rest of the world?
So I don’t really buy the idea that there was real substance to the position of Mike Lee against Paris (odds are good that he understands carbon and climate change but can’t let the voters know he does). Rather, it was abiding rancor against Barack Obama for having slipped something past an obstructionist Congress. That rancor has its match and more in the person of Donald Trump—a good fit!
Interestingly, Lee raised the procedural issue by way of pointing out that the Paris Agreement was not a treaty—which would have to be ratified by the Senate—and therefore its provisions were not legally binding anyway. So, he’s opposing something that he thinks really doesn’t have the muscle to stop our carbon rampage? Such illogic (an illogic not shared by Rex Tillerson, whose qualifications as a carbon booster are beyond question) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me except in light of the multiple grudges that Republican politicians have against our former president. The opposition to the Paris Agreement was essentially a poke in the eye to Obama and the 197 countries who were willing to put the fate of the planet ahead of petty politics.