Almost daily Corner bashing

Jonah Goldberg gotchas the Democrats:

if Kyoto is so vital — at least as a first step — ask yourself why Senate Democrats haven't taken it up. If your answer is that they can't because Bush has "refused to sign Kyoto" you need to stop letting Democratic talking points substitute for thinking. Bush has refused to sign Kyoto for the same reason he has refused to sign the armistice with Japan: he can't. A previous president already signed Kyoto, he just never sent it to the senate for ratification, because he knew it would fail. What's lacking isn't a presidential signature but a senate willing to adopt Kyoto. Some argue the president doesn't need to send the treaty to the senate, the senate can take it up any time it wants. Others claim the president does need to submit it to the senate. But either way, you haven't heard Reid clamoring to take it up. Why? Because if they adopted anything like Kyoto they'd be thrown out of office.

Yep. A great big gotcha, minus the part where he's correct about anything.

Bill Clinton didn't ratify Kyoto, because the Senate basically told him in no uncertain terms that they would refuse their consent. He knew it wasn't a gesture worth making under the circumstances. That may say something small about Bill Clinton's commitment to climate change at the time, but that was basically the Senate's fault.

The situation today, on the other hand, is pretty much equal and opposite. Right now the Senate sees no reason to bother with Kyoto because even if they could get the 67 "yeahs" they need procedurally, they know that George Bush will just refuse to ratify it. That would effectively end that.

Instead, as I type, they're designing climate change legislation that will (with any luck) be farther reaching vis-a-vis domestic emissions than Kyoto anyhow, and that stands a decent chance of passing on the floor as well. It will probably be vetoed, and will fail an over-ride vote, but will have laid the ground work for the next Congress under a new president who with any hope will sign it (or something like it). A

And this sequence of events, I predict, will be causal in precisely zero Democratic losses in November. 2008.

But this is Jonah Goldberg we're talking about here, so I should probably include a caveat here that his is a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made before with such detail or care. It just happens to be wrong.