The Supreme Court is taking up the case of Suncor Energy v Boulder County, which as the WSJ editors put it, asks whether state and local governments may use state tort laws to impose liability on American companies for the effects of global climate change.

The editors pointed out a number of reasons why the Boulder County effort to punish fossil fuel companies nationwide for global outcomes from a global range of putative sources should fail, including this one:

From the beginning, the Constitution was designed to ensure that the US would speak with one voice in its dealings abroad. States may not conduct their own foreign relations or establish competing national policies toward other countries. The Supreme Court has repeatedly enforced that principle, recognizing that federal authority in matters affecting foreign relations must be free from local interference.

There’s an additional aspect to this argument. One of the reasons for the Constitutional Convention was to correct the several ills and weaknesses in our Articles of Confederation, weaknesses that were verging on being fatal to our nascent nation. Under the Articles, the nominally central government could not speak for the nation on matters of international import; each of the 13 States of the Confederation could speak for itself on the global stage. Those 14 voices, usually in as much conflict with each other as with foreign nations, were tearing the Confederation apart if not exposing it to outright conquering by a still hostile Great Britain, a newly (overtly) hostile France, and an antipathetic Dutch Republic.

Our Constitution fixed that failure by seating foreign policy firmly in the hands of the Federal government, to be executed by the government’s chief executive, the President. States no longer had any say on foreign policy, other than via Representatives and Senators in Congress.