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President Trump Pets the Unicorn
President Trump has signed a series of Executive Orders to provide coronavirus relief for people in Democrat-occupied America (and elsewhere). Pelosi-Schumer thought they had him boxed in to force bail-outs for Democrat-occupied America to secure government-employee union pensions and pay, to pay for promises to illegal aliens, to make up for tax shortfalls when they shut down productive activity to kill the economy and secure power. But Trump is invoking the “Obama pen” and signing his way to re-election.
Is this a good government and Constitutional rectitude? No, it is not. But President Trump has decided that the Constitution is not a suicide pact; that the Supreme Court (notwithstanding having appointed two justices) is not going to aggressively protect the civil liberties of the people in the age of the Democratic-occupation. And President Trump is trying to manage the Executive with various weights and traps that even is his supposed “allies” in the GOP seem to accept as the cost of doing business in DC.
So President Trump has decided to pet the unicorn. He has set himself up to act in the peoples’ best short-term interest and dared the opposition to sue and stop him (and thus them). He is bringing to life the meme that “They are not really after me. They are after You. I am just in their way.” And that is what voters will come to believe if the Democrats try to stop him.
This is terrible economic policy, it blows a hole in the budget. But in reality, he is only in a bidding contest with other politicians. No one is prepared to engage in fiscal reality. Certainly not at the moment, and likely not ever. President Trump has two goals with this prestidigitation: (1) be re-elected to continue to set national policy, and (2) do his damnedest in the new year to resuscitate the economy to a point that it can service the debt and (maybe, hope over experience) start working on the deficit.
Some may say President Trump is not petting the unicorn, he is riding the dragon. But the Left is already riding a different dragon and just wants to put a foot on top of the debt dragon and ride both. You have your metaphors and I have mine.
What President Trump is doing is not based on good government or fiscal reality. But when “doing the right thing” means being played by the opposition and being complicit in the nation’s destruction, I choose petting the unicorn… At least for the present.
Published in General
DACA was an executive order. Not a law passed by Congress.
As has Congress itself. I can’t recall where I read it (it was ten years ago during the Obama administration at some point, and I probably read the account in the National Review), but Congress has ceded an enormous amount of its control and power to the executive branch. The writer of the article I read ascribed laziness on the part of Congress in doing so, and the writer said it was violating the very heart of the government checks-and-balances that the founders had created so brilliantly. We would pay a steep price. And indeed we have.
@marcin maybe Mike Lee and Article One Project – United States Senator Mike Lee
Let’s not forget how Congress has given up its power and responsibilities to the administrative state. That may be the worst tragedy of all.
We are seeing Trump doing what he does best, and it’s something that younger people cannot fully appreciate as well as older people. Sadly, some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
A person cannot go into an important negotiation unless he or she is prepared to walk away. If one of the negotiating parties cannot walk away, the other person has him at a complete disadvantage. Not walking away is how Republicans have been bamboozled by Congress for the last fifty years. If I had to designate a single cause for the budget mess the federal government is in, that would be it. The source has been these crazy bills that they’ve passed. You want to reform healthcare? Well, you’ll have to give my state these expensive public works projects to get it.
When my husband was a selectman for our town twenty years ago, he told me one day that he felt sorry for our town manager. Our town manager was responsible for negotiating with the teachers’ unions. Our budget was tight that year, but the teachers’ union contract was up for renewal. The labor relations laws stipulated that whenever management negotiated with the unions, management had to put something important on the table, otherwise management would be fined for not “negotiating in good faith.” Our town manager would put benefits on the table rather than cash just to stay within the law and our budget shortfall. This is how cities and towns and states have ended up in the fiscal difficulties they are all facing right now with pensions and healthcare for their retirees. Our town manager was deeply concerned about the bill coming due for these benefits, and he was right to be concerned. The labor laws did not allow him to walk away.
This is the unequal-power relationship between the executive branch and Congress that Trump is getting us out of. Give me a clean bill or I’m walking away. I hope young people in politics are paying attention. It’s really important.
Yes, yes, yes, thank you, it was Mike Lee. Thank you. (It would have come to me late tonight and woken me up! :-) )
They want their stuff, or they want the issue of the GOP and Trump denying people COVID relief funds as a campaign talking point for the next three months. That’s why Trump’s EO made them livid.
(And I probably should revise and extend my remarks about the media I posted earlier. Back in March, when Pelosi tried the same stunt by larding up the initial relief package by 50 percent with stuff that had nothing to do with the virus, the media at the moment — including The New York Times, which angered some of their staffers by running an accurate headline about who was stalling the legislation — was so freaked out that relief wouldn’t get to cities and states in time where they lived and worked, they refused to play partisan politics for a day or two and did their jobs, holding the Democrats’ feet to the fire until Pelosi backed down. It was sort of a mini-version of the 9/11 Effect that caused the media to stop being partisan for about 6-8 months due to the shock of the incident. Now that everything’s settled down, the bulk of the media shared Pelosi’s goal here of wanting the pork, including the changes in voting laws, or wanting the issue to bash Trump with, which is why Judy Woodruff calling Pelosi out on PBS was such a shock, and why no other big media outlets followed up on it Friday or Saturday.)
The EO really was the equivalent of Trump running through a hole in the wall of a canyon that’s been painted to look like a highway tunnel, though in this case and unlike with the Road Runner, Trump had to paint his own hole with the coronavirus funding EO, instead of having Wile E. Pelosi do it for him.
This has been a difficult task for Senator Lee I think because the Congress right now has more interests in keeping the Bureaucracy(Deep State) empowered and President Trump weakened than in any particular Constitutional failure. Trump is trying to serve the American people and this is not the focus of the Congress. So we got President Trump and now we get these XO’s.
Tucker has been pretty hard on Lee for other positions, but no doubt supports this. I would love to have Mark Levin interview Lee on this topic and pose the questions that Tucker has raised and give Lee a forum to respond. Sometimes when Tucker has someone on to address his criticisms the interview gets caught up in confrontation rather than exposition. I think this happened with Senator Braun of Indiana, when he came on Tucker to explain his support for modifying qualified immunity for police officers and other government officials. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) has been reasonably pushing for revisions for years, but Braun was not able to articulate his position because Tucker kept caricaturing (if that is a word) his position.
That is the challenge of challenging times: to have extended and civil discussions on how to redraw lines when the old boundaries have been obliterated.
That is the one thing that causes me to shut down his program.
The first executive order was issued by Washington. This demostrates a very supercicial understanding of history and seperation of powers.
We have no choice. Should the Democrats win, the Republic is less likely to survive. The country will continue, relatively wealthy and relatively healthy, just less so at an accelerating rate and the direction will become almost fixed and it can’t end well. We can say other centralized countries aren’t doing so terribly, but they had to learn to compete with the US. If we go in the same centralized direction, we’ll all go down together perhaps slowly and with time we might sort it all out, but the Chinese have no intention of giving us that time.
“This is terrible economic policy, it blows a hole in the budget.”
There’s a budget? Where might that be? OK, For decades, aside from a few new appropriations bills, the budget, for the most part, is a series of continuing resolutions. Congress does nothing while leaving all of the freshly printed money for the bureaucracy of the Executive Branch to decide how to spend. Guess what, President Trump runs the Executive Branch. He just decided how to spend some of that money. I don’t see anything new here.
I’m with you! I share all those features you just mentioned and I too count myself as being very lucky.
The money is already all gone. And so is the equity in the house.
Yeah but the printing press in the basement still works.
Indeed!
Me too. Where is their Constitutional basis?
I don’t have an issue with executive orders. The president has every right to clarify the extent of his legal ability to enforce the laws Congress has tasked him with enforcing. I do have an issue with using executive orders in such a sweeping manner that isn’t 1) plausibly related to necessary amounts of discretion that arises with any resource or 2) a clarification of some uncertainty inherent within a particular law.
I guess legally, the president does have the broad power he is trying to claim [in these orders] since it went unchallenged during the Obama administration, and similar actions were upheld. But I don’t see his ability to come up with unemployment payments or delay payroll taxes into the future. That doesn’t strike me as the purpose of an EO. I was critical of Obama when he did it and I must be critical of Trump when he does it as well. And I’ll be critical of Biden when he uses it to put a temporary hault to all background checks on gun sales or something weird. It is one thing to go to the edge of presidential power, it’s another thing to jump off that edge.
The Biden voter weighs in.
Yes, and any attempt they make to stop this digs the hole deeper.
I attribute much of this to John McCain who, along with Russ Finegold, inflicted possibly fatal damage on the Republic. McCain had a hissy fit about being involved in the Keating Five. As a consequence, he stripped US members of Congress from their traditional role as legislators. Since McCain-Finegold, they spend their time “dialing for dollars” as their staffs write the legislation. This has resulted in 2000 page bills that are incomprehensible to any but the bureaucracy, staffed by former Congressional staffers who interpret the laws they wrote. And make a nice living doing so.
An executive order is nothing more than a written policy decision. It’s certainly within the purview of Congress to oppose it with all the powers at its disposal.
I do too. I agree.
The hardest vote I have ever had was for McCain, as grateful as I am for his service to our country. Actually, that’s how I got myself through the act of voting for him. I liked voting for a veteran of the Vietnam War who was being honored and nominated instead of John Kerry who was a veteran but who insulted the military and our country at every turn. :-)
The omnibus bills are very bad for our country and should themselves be outlawed. They go against everything I believe in about a free people living in a country they themselves govern.
I’m thinking that it is neither the courts legislating, not Congress’ supposed laziness, nor the Executive’s over-reach at all. I think it is the wily use of all three by the Democrats. Whether appointing judges and swaying and threatening justices (even with packing SCOTUS), Congress forcing through 0bamacare in quasi-legal maneuverings, or 0bama writing EOs, it is the Democrats who are manipulating everything, and all three branches are too powerful when serving progressive goals, and passive when called to defend conservative goals.
As critical as I am of President Trump, I have been planning on voting for him in November. I don’t know if I can do it. I may have to just write in a name. Decade after decade we keep saying that we are the party/philosophy of fiscal responsibility, not like those Democrats, but this one time we have to spend waaaay more than we’re taking in. Next time, though, we’ll start being fiscally responsible. We’re putting a noose around our own necks and congratulating ourselves for our genius.
I seriously hope you rethink that position @randyweivoda. Trump never attempted to pretend he was a fiscal hawk. But there isn’t one of those anywhere on the ballot this year. With that being the case, all of the policy positions of the Democrats, when enforced along with their even worse fiscal policies, will only lead to an even quicker disaster. At least Trump establishes the possibility of enough economic growth to stave off disaster for a while longer. If you are on a ship taking in water, do you jump off or hang around for the hope of living?
I believe the sainted Ronald Reagan issued more EOs than either Obama or Trump. But then, Trump will have four more years to catch up.
I sure don’t congratulate the captain who keeps blowing holes in the hull. Looking at the National Debt Clock, I see that as a taxpayer, my share is $213,899 as of this moment. My wife owes that amount, too. Everyone has their fears of what could destroy this country. If this country falls it won’t be because of anything done by Iran or China. We’ll want to blame foreigners, of course, but we will have done it to ourselves with this irresponsible spending.
I’m tired of the “lesser of two evils” equation. If we keep going along with it, we deserve the evil. What if Trump were to return to being pro-choice? What if he went back to his pre-Republican-conversion position on gun control? Is there no line a Republican can cross before one can opt out? I’m not talking about voting for a Democrat or withholding my votes from all Republicans. But I will not automatically give my vote to any destructive fool just because they wear the elephant logo.