Earlier this afternoon, Rush Limbaugh read from Quin Hillyer’s analysis of what we can expect from an Obama presidency coupled with a highly partisan Democrat Congress. The Democrats, Hilyer argued, would seek “to drastically tilt the playing field, seed our side of the field with land mines and, in short, rig the process to make it next to impossible for the political right, or Republicans, to recover. It will begin with their efforts to secure a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators (including the two independents).”

This brought to mind a gambit that Team Obama may use to get around the Senate’s decade-long opposition to the Kyoto Protocol — and it is an alarming one.

I will write in more detail on this later, but for now suffice it to say that Sen. Obama has bought into a proposal, drawn up for the Brookings Institution and Resources for the Future by Clinton-Gore Kyotophile Nigel Purvis, to classify Kyoto (II) as an executive agreement (EA), thereby skirting constitutional impediments like the requirement in Article II, Section 2 for the Senate’s “advice and consent” on treaties requiring approval by two-thirds of the Senate.

This would require asking his friends in Congress, sometime in the next year, for the equivalent of “trade promotion authority,” the “fast-track” procedure under which presidents negotiate free-trade agreements. In this case it would be called “CPA” — “Climate Protection Authority” (seriously). The proposed legislation would have several parts: First, a (relatively) mild domestic greenhouse-gas reduction requirement from current levels (not Kyoto’s 1990 construct demanded by Russia and Europe); then a set of negotiating principles for an international agreement (“with no international preconditions”) and the authority to submit the result to a simple majority vote in both chambers, with no amendments and no filibusters permitted, in lieu of Article II ratification. That package would in turn require adoption of a serious, Kyoto-style GHG-reduction regime.

I don’t know if the Waxman-Markey challenge to the unacceptably moderate chairmanships of Dingell and Boucher, announced yesterday, is part of this — but if successful, that certainly would help such a plan.

If Obama does adopt this plan, it would be the most brazen use of EAs we have ever seen. The arguments Purvis advances for an EA in this context are facile and often self-defeating. He invokes Reagan using EAs 2,800 times, but this merely affirms that the tool is typically used for mundane matters, and certainly not in response to a decade of Senate opposition to a regime mandating the sort of restrictions that Kyoto calls for.

This plan demands that we stand firm and fight for our shared principles, not just on Kyoto but on a whole suite of issues. If the Democrats find their opposition back on its heels, they could revolutionize the president’s treaty powers by extending EAs to areas with massive economic implications. But if we define the issue for what it is, they will be caught seriously overreaching.

– Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Force, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.