We lose the republic not with a bang but a whimper*

By Rick Manning

White House spokesperson Josh Earnest declared the treaty ratification process dead when he told the White House press corps that those who disagree with Obama on global warming should not have a say on a treaty the President negotiated with China that would be economically disastrous for America.

A treaty that presumably America would be expected to abide by.

In his statement, what Earnest was really saying is that elections don’t matter unless people who agree with us get elected, and we don’t have to abide by decisions of the American people because we know what is best even if no one else does.

Just a couple of years ago in 2013, President Obama famously chided Republicans who controlled the House of Representatives by saying, “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about.”

Bold and interesting rhetoric, and since President Obama brought our predecessors up, here is what the U.S. Constitution says about the federal government’s treaty-making process. The specific, relevant language on the Executive Branch’s powers in Article 2 read, “He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

Note that the power to make treaties is conditional on the advice and consent of the Senate, and while inconvenient for Obama, there isn’t any clause that says, unless they disagree with the President, in which case he can do whatever the heck he wants. Yet that is exactly what Josh Earnest is asserting, that those who were elected but don’t agree with the President should not have a say in the treaty-making process.

So, Obama, discontent with the rules of America, has presented his climate plan to cut CO2 emissions in the U.S. by more than 25 percent in the next decade (while allowing China to keep spewing filth into the air until 2030) to the United Nations (UN) for their review.

After all, the wealth redistributionists at the UN are more than willing to embrace a climate deal that destroys the U.S. economy in the hopes of getting a few morsels of the fallout for their own little fiefdoms.

But there is plenty of time to discuss Obama’s wayward climate deal; the more immediate threat to the nation is Earnest’s blithe dismissal of the election of anyone who doesn’t agree with his boss as being relevant to the decision-making process.

Over the next two years, we will hear Obama rocking the vote, claiming that every vote matters, fighting against state attempts to stop voter fraud, and doing everything his camp can think of to turn out voters who support him.

These efforts and words are hollow when compared to Earnest’s declaration that the Congress is dead because they won’t rubber-stamp the President’s policies, and by inference anyone who bothered to vote for its members in 2014 were wasting their time.

A small pizza shop in Indiana declares that they won’t cater a hypothetical gay wedding, and the whole Twitterverse explodes in millennial passion of bullying tolerance.  Within 24 hours, the White House Press Secretary declares that voting is interesting, but not relevant, unless you vote for people who agree with the President; and nary a word of angst is tweeted.

And that is how freedom dies without anyone even noticing, in the sound of the fury of Internet brownshirts clubbing a dissenting business owner into oblivion, while the White House affirms that dissent on their climate agenda won’t be permitted to the approving nods of the self-created arbiters of political correctness.

There is no denying it: fundamental transformation is here.

The author is president of Americans for Limited Governmen