Collective Conscious

Lou Dobbs and James Inhofe, via Think Progress:

INHOFE: Yes, that’s cor­rect. He can’t do that. I just had an inter­view with a sta­tion in Copen­hagen, in Denmark –

DOBBS: [laugh­ter]

INHOFE: — that they were all under the assump­tion the pres­i­dent could uni­lat­er­ally do that. No, that’s not true. In fact, one of my good friends, a Demo­c­rat sen­a­tor, Jim Webb from Vir­ginia has sent a let­ter to the pres­i­dent and I’m quot­ing a sen­tence out of it now: “As you well know from your time in the Sen­ate, only spe­cific leg­is­la­tion agreed upon in the Con­gress, or a treaty rat­i­fied by the Sen­ate, could actu­ally cre­ate such a com­mit­ment on behalf of our country.”

So, we need to make sure — and that’s the main rea­son I was going to go to Copen­hagen was to, if Bar­bara Boxer and John Kerry went there and made some kind of a com­mit­ment that we were going to do some­thing, I wanted to make sure that coun­tries were fully informed that we are not going to be pass­ing leg­is­la­tion that will accom­plish what Pres­i­dent Obama I believe is going to tell on the 9^th.

DOBBS: Sen­a­tor, this begs the ques­tion, if I may put it for­ward right now: Who the hell does this pres­i­dent think he is?

Yeah, who does this Obama guy think he is, the Pres­i­dent of the United States? Does he really believe that he’s the gov­ern­ment offi­cial entrusted with the respon­si­bil­ity of Chief Diplo­mat? And if so, does he also think that for­eign rela­tions lie within the purview of the exec­u­tive branch?

While all those things are, in fact, true, we know that Obama’s for­eign agree­ments won’t nec­es­sar­ily be rat­i­fied or even sub­mit­ted for rat­i­fi­ca­tion (see see the League of Nations, SALT II, and the Kyoto Pro­to­col). Obama knows this too, which is why he’s been push­ing Con­gress to get some results. Let’s hope we see some.