Hair of the Dog -- Politics are Dominated by Hypocrisy
Nearly 200 new Executive Orders? If I do nothing else I can still blog for weeks just going through the list.
Over a third of these are reversals of Biden EO's, which I can't really complain about. Hopefully student loan bailouts are dead for good, for example.
Some are the usual brand of political virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the one asking all government departments to go after inflation). Everything old is new again:
Some of the EO's are a new and uniquely Trumpian brand of virtue-signaling idiocy (eg the Gulf of America). Maybe Canada will respond by renaming Lake Superior as Lake Canada or Lake Trudeau. I don't get quite as worked up about renaming Mt Denali back to Mt McKinley, but the justification is hilarious -- to celebrate American greatness. By naming it McKinley?! So was Mt Jewel a non-starter?
But the EO's that really caught my eye and I want to comment on first are the ones declaring national emergencies, presumably to give the Administration special authority to pretty much ignore every other branch of government. I really hate this idea, but it is particularly incredible given that Trump and the Republicans (rightly) chafed for years under authoritarian actions taken by the President and various governors under the guise of a COVID emergency. So having railed for four years against declaring a national emergency to buff up the Administration's unaccountable power, Trump is going to declare two?
The border emergency declaration is not unexpected, and though I disagree with it, at least the situation there has the virtue of being fairly unprecedented (at least in the size of the border crossing numbers). But energy? What the F is the national emergency in energy? Sure there is a lot of stupidity in our energy policy and lots of things that need fixing, but there has been for decades. Having lived through the gas lines of 1972 and 1978 and the Three Mile Island emergency and oil prices that have swung from $10 to $130 and back again over time, its hard to imagine anything in the current energy markets that could be considered an emergency (now if we were all living in Germany, I might come to a different conclusion).
One other bit of bipartisan hypocrisy. For the last several years Democrats have blasted Conservative critics for carrying every challenge of a Biden law or regulation down to U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Texas, who became a pretty reliable go-to judge when a national injunction was wanted. Where did the Republicans ever get this idea? Perhaps from Democrats, who carried every Trump EO and regulation over to Hawaii and Judge Derrick K. Watson who would reliably enjoin all of Trump's efforts. My guess is that Judge Watson is about to get busy again. Maybe we should have an over-under betting pool to the first national injunction of a Trump EO. In 2017 it was 7 days, for example, from the time Trump issued his travel ban until it was first enjoined and 9 days between the 2nd travel ban and when Watson issued his national injunction.