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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
I believe it strictly involves the reallocation of funds through the use of various provision that allow for such reallocation. It’s sort of like when he shifted around fund to fund the border wall. Unless I’m mistaken, there is no new unauthorized spending unless you consider laws that allow the shifting of allocations illegitimate per se.
It’s a procedural issue, not a constitutional one.
It’s simply not an honorable way to govern. It’s underhanded.
How so?
I’d also follow that up by saying that generally presidential power over domestic issues is thought to grow as a function of unclear legislation (so EOs occur because presidents really do have to fill in gaps in the logic of enforcement, and this doesn’t count the times Congress actually delegates power, which it likes to do). Trump bargains with Congress over legislation but this time he calls their bluff. The EOs and memorandum are more nuanced than I initially suspected but I still have issues with their particular application.
Unfortunately I must disagree. It’s fine. It isn’t optimal, but Congress often has difficulty agreeing on things. Issue oriented members in a committee may work hard on a compromise bill only to see it blown up by demagogues on the floor. Rinse and repeat this across multiple issues/bills. Omnibus bills are one way of preventing this by putting many people on the hook at the same time. It isn’t optimal but it makes sense. It can encourage waste and other pork to be slipped in above and beyond previous compromises. But it is a useful commitment mechanism. I wouldn’t want everything to just be an omnibus bill, but they also aren’t random events.
The option here was to stand on principle over how funding should be approved, when the other side in the person of Nancy Pelosi was not bargaining in good faith based on this supposedly being an emergency situation, or do the EO. If Trump could have expected a fair hearing from the media, holding out a little longer might have been tenable, but not when you know you’re getting blamed for the delay because the Democrats and most of the media want it as a campaign issue.
That feels about right. Now I’m wondering, does Congress want to bargain over this EO? I think it does change the game. The Democrats’ first instincts were to complain but they don’t want to sue to take $400 away from people. So, they have to figure out a way to come up with “something” because I sense that they don’t want to give Trump a “win.” Which is a shame because it means they’d rather see the economy suffer than admit that Trump at least did “something.” (Though to be clear I think the EOs are too expansive for my tastes.) For me the value in the EO is the way it changes the bargaining environment. But I am still in a “wait and see” phase.
Doesn’t Trump want to keep sending people checks for doing nothing? I think his executive orders lowered it from $600 to $400 but that money is coming from somewhere.
At the moment, both the Democrats and the media seem to be trying to figure out a new talking point besides “Trump didn’t provide enough emergency funding,” or “Trump acted illegally with his EO.” Neither of those is likely to get swing voters outrageously outraged at the president, even if they are taken up enthusiastically by the #NeverTrump crowd.
Pelosi could opt to go back to the table and talk about a clean bill, but from Trump’s standpoint there’s no reason at this point to trust that she wouldn’t start bargaining in bad faith again, and the pro-Democrat spin during the re-opened talks would be Trump is heartless if he doesn’t bump the coronavirus benefits to $800 a month.
I’m at the “that sounds about right.” Phase. I mean I guess we can infer from the Dem leadership’s messaging how this actually polls. A lot of people really do think that if Trump does something it is bad. So that is a thing. But it is interesting the immediate and conflicting arguments from Dems was “this is illegal” and “he didn’t do enough.” So I think they may actually have felt caught off guard by this move.
My husband and I had a couple of friends who were Republican legislators in Massachusetts, and one friend who was a Democrat representative to the U.S. House. All three of them felt the same way: they were very frustrated over long bills they felt they had to vote for that contained laws or spending that they knew would cause problems later but the bill on their desk was the only way they could get the thing done that was the most pressing problem at the moment. When a bill is 200 to 300 pages, it is bound to contain such trade-offs, but when a bill is 1,500 pages, which was the length of each half of the healthcare reform act, the trade-offs pile up ridiculously.
Which brings me to my other problem with the omnibus bills. My personal interest in written laws is not as a lawyer but as an editor. I was involved in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency twenty-five years ago, so I had to get into the legislation that established the EPA and the clean water act. The laws I read contained so many inconsistencies that I was floored by it. When the EPA was established, it was created by a law that cobbled together a lot of other older laws and agencies. It was very hard to get through the law and match up the cross-references within it. The language was inconsistent from one page to the next. It takes an editor about two minutes in a law library to understand why our courts are so busy. :-) Publishers of textbooks and reference works deal with this issue all the time in publishing their long-running works. When you come across the seventeenth edition of some book, know that the internal debate before it was published centered on the question, “Do we continue to patch this thing, or do we spend the money to start from scratch?” You can only patch so much before you start creating problems.
Finally, how much fruitful discussion can actually occur in the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate about a 1,500-page bill, or worse, as happened with the Affordable Care Act, two 1,500-page bills?
Omnibus bills make it too easy to slide things into law that shouldn’t be. They are simply unmanageable.
Pelosi’s intransigence on a clean bill and her desire to use the zero availability of COVID relief funds to bash Trump and Republicans as heartless during the campaign season actually opened the door for Trump to do something that likely wouldn’t have happened even if a compromise deal had been reached, which was to cut the benefits from $600 to $400 without looking like the bad guy.
You already heard complaints from people in the restaurant and hospitality sectors over the past two months, as businesses reopened, that they weren’t getting all their employees back, because they were saying they could either take home more money with the $600 benefit, or their coronavirus fears made them think the $600 was the better option. Trump’s EO cuts it by a third, and offers more of a motivation for those who can go back to work to do so. But because Pelosi was willing to hold out and let those same people have $0 in the upcoming weeks, she and other Democrats’ complaints that $400 isn’t enough don’t have the impact they would have in a negotiation situation.
The deal for the Democrats was always that the media would spin it so that Trump, and not them, would get the blame for the $0 situation. Now if they sue to block the EO, they’re the ones trying to take the payments back down from $400 to $0 (though this won’t stop them from trotting out people in the near future saying they can’t survive on $400 because of Trump).
It’s not 400 a week. It’s 400 + whatever they would get from their states unemployment system.
In NC I was laid off for a month.
The payments were 600 +300 from the state for 900/week.
Me too! Uhhh, what’s a whillywhas?
I heard a news report (for what it’s worth) that Trump ordered his underlings to search for a way to divert other funds to pay people’s mortgages, college loans, and business rent. I’m thinking, when I hear that, if our government has that kind of money to “divert”…in other words, layin’ around…then why the heck do I have to pay all these taxes?
I’m just happy to hear the President is suspending the payroll tax on those earning less than $100,000 a year for both the employee and the employer. This is the most regressive and damaging income tax on low income individuals and small businesses. My hope is that this will draw enough attention to have this made permanent.
Because those over $100000 do not deserve any help?
Don’t try to attribute your words to me.
@rodin What does “pet the unicorn” mean? I googled it, but I couldn’t find anything that fit with this context. :-)
Dunno, but if the crowd leaves it up to my imagination, it’ll be dirty.
whillywha definition: Noun (plural whillywhas) 1. (Scotland) [you know, sometimes it’s better just to use your imagination]
Its an expression that came to my mind when I realized that Trump was doing something that was completely in line with the kind of magical utopian thinking that progressives promote. And thus, they could only sit there with mouth agape wonder and no response. And their own weapon was being turned on them.
Does Biden sniff the Unicorn?
E pluribus Unicorn.
I sure hope that one catches on.
Yes, and to him it smells like cotton candy.
It was all Kabuki Theater.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-can-t-pay-for-Trump-s-jobless-15473142.php
I don’t know the budget. Newsome is saying that if they were to apply for the funding that they wouldn’t be able to pony up the 25% they’d need to pay (to get the emergency funds totaling $400 the states would need to pay $100 of it). This could just be a brute fact. It could be that he is seeing how this polls. Cali is so democratic that it is a safe place to float out a way to oppose Trump’s plan. I figured a few states may not apply for the money. I figured if Cali did it it would be for political gamesmanship. But maybe they don’t have it. Maybe they haven’t looked hard enough. I don’t know. But it will be interesting to see how this evolves going forward. Are states allowed to use CARES money? A lot of them haven’t spent all of it or even most of it.
Wile E. Coyote. I believe it was on his mailbox, and all the packages Acme sent him.
Well, that’s kinda what I was thinkin’.