Categories
too much government

Five-​Alarm Foolishness

Will President Trump declare a “national emergency”? Is he that desperate to get the funds needed to build a wall (or steel-​slate fence or barrier of some sort) on the U.S. border with Mexico?

It looks increasingly likely, but who knows … 

What I do know is how foolish and dangerous it is to provide “emergency” loopholes for politicians.

Words have very mutable meanings to politicians. “Emergency” will entail whatever the president invoking it desires. 

In fact, when Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976, the legislation didn’t even bother to define the term, “emergency.” 

Every time I hear “national emergency,” it reminds me of Colorado and Oregon, where state constitutions are clear that an emergency entails a true threat to the health and safety of the public. But since those constitutions protect emergency bills from the check of a citizen referendum, legislators make use of the obvious loophole: a majority of bills in those states now carry a clause dishonestly claiming emergency status.

I guess we should not be shocked to discover that Congress has awarded the president at least 136 emergency powers, as Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice informs The Washington Post.

Ninety-​six of those “powers” allow the president to act unilaterally.

What sort of blind power giveaways are we talking about? 

Goitein explains that in a declared emergency, under current law, Congress has authorized “the president to shut down or take over radio stations and even suspend a law that prohibits government testing of chemical and biological weapons on unwitting human subjects.”

We need a wall, all right … between politicians and this foreign notion of extra-​constitutional “emergency” powers. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

emergency, alarm, Trump, Donald, President, power

P

Categories
Accountability First Amendment rights general freedom media and media people

Pravda in the Izvestia

Back in the USSR’s heyday, the joke about the two major newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth” — and published by the Communist Party) and Izvestia (meaning “news” — and published by the Soviet State), was that “there’s no Truth in the News and no News in the Truth.”

Nowadays, in Trump’s America, we have fake news. And one reason Donald Trump won the presidency was his defiant stance against the “lying press.”

Which is why, when Trump announced, last week, his intent to give out awards to the news media for their top “fake news” stories of 2017, he was playing to his base. This week he announced his picks. It did not exactly bowl everyone over.

Indeed, I am going to skip most of it, noticing only that the press whined a bit and picked at the list on technical grounds, and that Sen. Flake gave Trump some flak.

But Trump’s pick for First Place is worth thinking about.

And the Duranty* goes toNew York Times economist Paul Krugman!

What for? The Nobel Laureate’s insane and unhinged prediction immediately after Trump’s win: “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

An embarrassing play for Doomsayer Attention, which has been “trumped” (so to speak) by new record stock market highs.

Of course, a global depression may be in the offing — but it probably won’t be Trump’s fault, and Krugman is totally resistant to acknowledging that dire event’s likely structural causes (debt, Fed policy).

But note: prophecy isn’t “news,” and in announcing the award Trump characterized his win in 2016 as a “landslide.”

So save a Duranty for Trump.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* My term, not a “Newsy” or “Fakesy,” and named, of course, after Walter Duranty, the Times’ Pulitzer Winning Fake News apologist for the Soviet Union and Stalin, back in the 1930s.


PDF for printing