A Bit of Slight of Hand?

Recently, the EPA declared CO2 (you know, that gas without which all plants on Earth would die and subsequently there would be no oxygen for animals to breathe and all life would cease to exist, yeah that CO2) to be a dangerous gas in order to give it the authority to regulate CO2 emissions. Presumably, this was an end run around a Congress failing to take swift action on cap and trade legislation so that the Obama administration could use the bureaucracy to circumvent the legislature. (Note that this would have previously been strictly forbidden by our Supreme Court prior to the sudden change after FDR's court packing scandal. While FDR failed, a cowed Supreme Court started finding his depression era programs suddenly constitutional.)

There may be a more sinister slight of hand at work here, however. The EPA made it's CO2 finding public the opening day of the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Many still believed this was meant to force Congress to take action and to show Copenhagen that our lord and savior Barack Obama was willing to take immediate action, peace be upon him. I think they were wrong. By issuing this finding, the EPA may be allowing President Obama to circumvent the Constitution in another manner, specifically by abrogating the requirement that 2/3 of the Congress approve any treaty under Article 2 Section 2. Essentially, the Administration would sign on to the Copenhagen Treaty, then, rather than submitting the treaty to Congress for approval, it would utilize the EPA findings on greenhouse gases to implement the binging portions of the treaty through the administrative rule making process and the EPA itself.

While, strictly speaking, my own analysis finds this to be unconstitutional to the degree that the treaty would create a world body with enforcement powers over the U.S., the EPA could effectively mirror any decisions from such a world body and administratively hand down punishment. We already know that President Obama sees the Constitution as a set of negative restrictions against government rather than the positive rights of citizens and that he thus only sees the Constitution as an obstruction to government power. Is it then unreasonable to think he might be looking for a manner to circumvent the Constitution in this manner? After all, look at his comments. Environmentalism is a matter of social justice and redistribution of wealth. President Obama feels the Civil Rights movement failed to address these issues by becoming to focused on the courts (see the linked comments). I have no doubt that he would want to implement his visions of social justice and redistribution through whatever mechanism possible.

I'll finish this off simply by saying that I hope I'm wrong.