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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
You mean like impeachment?
That’s your right. I disagree, but I respect your decision.
Well, I did opt out after “Mississippi 2014″…not because of “a” Republican but because of “the” Republicans. The expensive and insulting “compassion” of Bush-Frist through the more expensive and more insulting Failure Theater of McConnell-Boehner…all capped off by the Deep Party taking one final piss on the Tea Party’s head was all I could take. I realize that we all have our own thresholds but, with all due respect (truly), to take a stand on long dead “Republican Principles” now that we are circling the drain seems a bit pointless.
Sorta like all caps, no?
No one who thinks about it really believes that the debt will be repaid.
You are about 26 years late.
“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” James Madison
Man, I hate it when people cast aspersions on my whillywhas.
Waltzing Matilda . . .
COL (chuckle out loud). To be honest I love that line, but I still don’t rightly know what it would be.
Nancy’s reaction is a sign of desperation
I was hoping the loss of the House would be a wake up call for Republicans.
I was wrong and naive.
deus ex machina?
This is an excellent analysis. Trump’s executive orders are not good government and spend money we don’t have. But I support them anyway.
Trump has refused to play the role as scripted by Democrats, a role that mainstream Republicans have been happy to play repeatedly over the last two decades. Democrats propose some massive spending initiative that Republicans “oppose” on grounds of financial prudence, but instead of opposing the spending full stop – a move that would actually be financially responsible – they follow the Democrats lead, only lowering the amount of money to be spent in the proposal. The analogy used back in the Tea Party days was that the Democrats propose to drive off the cliff at 80 mph while the Republican opposition wants to drive off the cliff only at 50 mph.
The Democrats denounce the Republicans as mean-spirited, the Republicans eventually cave, giving the Democrats yet another win and raising their morale, while Republicans console their base with muttering about how it would have been even worse if they weren’t there. It’s the worst possible outcome, and Republicans haven’t found a way out of this dynamic for 20 years.
Trump has upended this dynamic. He understands that we are far past any limits on fiscal prudence. There is going to be another massive “stimulus” package funded by debt and Federal Reserve money printing. Nothing he might do will stop it. Since it’s going to happen anyway, why not take the credit for it and put Democrats in the position of being the mean-spirited ogres if they try to oppose him in their typical anti-Trumpian way? It’s brilliant.
I have to believe that Mitch McConnell likes things just the way they are.
The choice for Republicans, unfortunately, was to spend an extra trillion on Democrat causes, which would likely lose the House, Senate and risking the Presidency, and then have America suffer even more under Democrat hegemony. This is not a time to stand on principle and think it would be effective in the least. It would contribute to the demise of freedom.
“Fiscal Responsibility” in this system is as fantastical as the Tooth Fairy. Withholding your vote won’t help anyone. It might make you feel better about yourself. But every vote for Trump will count. Victory first, Landslide second! Landslide being the target.
Your vote counts!
now is not the time to be a ‘fiscal hawk’
Pelosi’s mistake here was to think Trump was locked in to following the script, when people were saying back in 2016 that Trump does not have fiscal conservatism in his bones, and would be willing to make deals with the Democrats on big ticket items like infrastructure. Schumer seemed to be preparing for that in 2016, because he attacked Trump less than other Dems during the campaign, but changed in 2017, because the party’s white-hot hatred at Hillary not winning would have cost Schumer the Senate Minority Leader’s job if he had tried to schoomze Trump to get him to work with Dems on their spending projects.
In this case, fiscal conservatives can howl about Trump’s lack of restraint, and they’re not wrong. But when you have a situation where Pelosi is working in tandem with the majority of the big media outlets to either force Trump to agree to items which have nothing to do with COVID relief or be branded as heartless to the economic victims of the virus, the end result of standing by fiscally conservative principles would be to boost the odds of President Biden, because Judy Woodruff was the exception, not the rule here, of grilling Pelosi on why she refused to allow a clean bill to be voted on by the House. Trump not being fiscally conservative here is also why Dems are angry.
I missed the spending, unless declining to enforce a tax is now spending.
Yes, it is according to the applied budgetary accounting methods. The government understands that the money is theirs and they allow you the temporary use of some of it out of the great goodness of their collective hearts.
Alternate Headline (at least as to the Payroll Tax): “Trump declines to enforce a tax of questionable Constitutionality where the funds are funneled into an unconstitutionally segregated fund in support of a program that is incompatible to with the Constitutional scheme.”
Why can’t the legislature legislate as it sees fit? I don’t really see the problem. Would you propose a amendment to the Constitution?
Absent war, how are people (or other countries) going to collect. The real lesson will be don’t lend to people you can’t force to pay you.
Flippant answer: Take it up with George Washington, who issued the first one.
Short answer: Read John Yoo’s book.
Longer answer: It depends on the subject matter of the order. It could be as innocuous has directing his subordinates (the rest of the executive branch) on how to do their jobs. If it deals with foreign policy, the Supreme Court has already stated that foreign policy is basically entirely a presidential matter, so any executive order dealing with foreign policy would more than likely be allowable. The President could also instruct the rest of the executive branch to decline to enforce laws the President believed to be unconstitutional. Now, can the President decline to enforce laws he believes to be bad policy? The practical answer is that if he isn’t impeached and removed over the matter, yes.
I basically agree. It’s really a weird question because the functional limit to the President’s power to decline to enforce a law is Congress’s willingness to impeach and remove him over it or the people’s unwillingness to re-elect him over it. A court that thinks it has the power to direct the President to enforce the law is more dangerous than anything else we are discussing.
How would a court enforce such an order since that would seem to be what makes it dangerous?
That’s part of the problem.
Silly rabbit, hewing to Constitutionality. What next, actually expecting the rule of law?
The other aspect of the EOs is those in Congress realizing they could mitigate the vagaries of the consequences of their votes come the next election by simply not voting, and allowing the Executive Branch to do things that Constitutionally are tasked to Congress.
The EOs let them escape direct accountability, even as they get mad about the EOs for one reason or another — fiscal conservatives because it’s spending money without Congressional authorization, when the nation already has piled up trillions in debt, while progressives are apoplectic because Trump didn’t follow the script and either cave in on spending more money or give them a campaign issue by delaying COVID relef funds from being extended. Justin Amash might be ready to impeach Trump on the fiscal side over his coronavirus EOs, but I doubt even Adam Schiff is stupid enough to put this forward as an article, based on the idea only Democrats are allowed to spend money the government doesn’t have.