Tag: power

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national politics & policies Popular responsibility U.S. Constitution

Congress’s King

King of Diamonds, King Donald, Donald Trump, trade, tariff, power,

Politics today reveals a troubling dialectic.

Thesis: President Trump boasts that he is going to unilaterally “do something” as if he were Emperor, not President. 

Antithesis: Then comes pushback from political opponents and the media, castigating our current commander-​in-​chief for imagining himself a lawless dictator. 

Synthesis: This is soon followed, however, by the discovery that the president does have such awesome power. 

Legally.

In our constitutional system, can a president can just wake up one day and slap tariffs on imports? Well, numbskulls in Congress passed a law handing the president that specific power.

When President Trump declared an emergency to re-​direct money, appropriated by Congress for different purposes, toward building the Wall, many argued that the president cannot usurp Congress’s undisputed power of the purse. True, but irrelevant. Congress had indeed delegated all these undefined and largely unchecked “emergency” powers to the prez.

Last week, as the trade war with China was coming to a boil, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing … your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”*

I thought, “Does Trump really think he has the legal authority to order all U.S. businesses to leave China?”

Yes … and apparently he does. It’s called The International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

“One of the enduring phenomena of the Trump era,” University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told CNN, “is going to be the list of statutes that give far too much power to the President, but that many didn’t used to worry about — assuming there’d be political safeguards.”

Or that “the right person” would always be in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Note that Mr. Trump did not order the companies to leave, but did assert his “absolute right” to do so.

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King of Diamonds, King Donald, Donald Trump, trade, tariff, power,

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too much government

Five-​Alarm Foolishness

emergency, alarm, Trump, Donald, President, power

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

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Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall national politics & policies term limits

Electing a Better Way

domino, power, election, term limits, initiatives

For the seventh time in the last 22 years, the Metro Nashville Council put a measure on the ballot to weaken or abolish their own term limits. And for the seventh time voters said no. 

Term limits were under attack elsewhere in Tennessee — along with Ranked Choice Voting. The Memphis City Council foisted three dubiously worded ballot questions on voters. The measure to weaken the council’s limits, neglected to explain that to voters. The other two misleading measures sought to repeal or block Ranked Choice Voting from going to effect.

Voters put down all three. 

Speaking of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), after several squeaker U.S. Senate races, perhaps Republicans and Democrats will reconsider the reform. 

The Arizona race is still too close to call. Republican Martha McSally leads with 49.3 percent of the vote against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema with 48.4 percent. But Angela Green, the Green Party candidate, took 2.2 percent of the vote. Sinema used to be a Green Party activist, so it’s not unreasonable to think those folks would have preferred her to the Republican.

In Montana, incumbent Democrat Jon Tester has won. He garnered 49.6 percent of the vote, while Republican challenger Matt Rosendale received 47.5 percent and Libertarian Rick Breckenridge racked up 2.9 percent, more than the margin of difference. 

Last week, the Libertarian seemingly endorsed Rosendale. “I am here today to support Matt and his candidacy,” Breckenridge told reporters. “And endorse him in his continuing effort to be the front man in the cause of liberty.”

Using RCV, voters can rank their choices and, were their first choice eliminated, their votes would go to their second choice until some candidate achieves an actual majority.

Thus ending “spoilers” — and giving voters more say-so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
ballot access general freedom initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people Regulating Protest

Three Bad Propositions

initiative, petition, power, money, elections

Two propositions on this November’s California ballot, Propositions 8 and 11, have found an opponent.

“Both would have voters decide very narrow union-​management conflicts in two relatively small medical service sectors,” explains Dan Walters, long the dean of California columnists. Unions are sponsoring Prop 8, which “purports to limit profits in clinics that provide dialysis treatments to sufferers of kidney failure.” Ambulance companies are behind Prop 11, which would “require ambulance crews to remain on call during meal and rest breaks.”

Walters thinks it “foolish to expect November’s nine-​plus million voters to make even semi-​informed decisions about their provisions, much less understand how dialysis clinics and ambulance services operate, or should operate.”

Well, yes, but this criticism applies to government universally. Legislators don’t understand how every business or industry functions, or should function, either. Even when politicians pretend to comprehend, by what right do they micromanage other people’s businesses and labor contracts?

Freedom, not government regulation, should be the default position.

But Walters’ fix runs against this logic. He thinks that upping the required percentage of signatures for ballot placement “by half … might discourage the misuse of the system for issues that cannot be fairly and rationally decided by voters.”

Don’t bet on it.

As Walters himself admits, making it tougher and more expensive to petition a measure onto the ballot won’t block the well-​heeled: “any interest group with a few million bucks and an axe to grind can qualify a ballot measure, regardless of their merits.”

But it would disenfranchise grassroots groups.

Defeat bad measures; don’t destroy the democratic process.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
Accountability general freedom government transparency incumbents insider corruption local leaders moral hazard national politics & policies term limits

“Dorky” Doesn’t Define It

term limits, Congress, myth, power, corruption

“Term limits,” said Daniel McCarthy, editor of The Modern Age, in a recent podcast conversation with historian Tom Woods, “was one of the dorkiest ideas of the 1994 so-​called Newt Gingrich revolution.”

He characterized it as not having really gone anywhere.

Huh?

Granted, Congress is still not term-​limited. But Americans in 15 states — including California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, and representing 37 percent of the nation’s population — do enjoy term-​limited state legislatures.*

And it sure wasn’t Newt Gingrich’s idea. Gingrich opposed it.

McCarthy repeats the old chestnut that what term limitation “winds up doing is actually weakening Congress and congresspeople in particular — relative to their own staff, who stay in Congress and become sort of experts and learn how to manipulate their congressman, and also relative to the executive branch who have people rotate in from time to time.”

Nifty theory — one very popular with politicians, who know that voters fear unelected influences on legislation.

The reality, however, is that Congress, designed by the Constitution’s framers to be both most powerful and closest to the people‚ is, today, the weakest branch.

And legislators are not term limited.

Ditch the “manipulation theory”; adopt a “collaboration theory”: legislators with Methuselah-​long careers learn, sans “rotation in office,” to feather their own nests and those of the interest groups that fund their re-​elections (and insider trading schemes).

Term limits remain popular with normal Americans because voters intuitively grasp the reality of such everyday corruption, which is directly tied to Congress having sloughed off so much constitutional responsibility. 

We need term limits to restore a Congress sold out by professional politicians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Nine of the ten largest cities in America likewise have termed-​limited their elected officeholders. For more information, see the links to the column from which this episode of Common Sense is condensed.

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Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall local leaders national politics & policies political challengers property rights Regulating Protest too much government

A Sanctuary from Centralization

decentralize, centralize, federal and state and county, power, nullification, distributed

Defiance … nullification. It is a trend.

I take it as a sign of our contentious times that we now witness states in open rebellion against centralized control from the Imperial City of Washington, D.C., while cities and counties are also rattling the chains set by their respective state capitals.

The sweep of marijuana decriminalization and legalization is only the most obvious. The rise of “sanctuary cities” defying federal government immigration laws — often backed up by state legislatures — has been a contentious issue, with progressives supporting this sort of nullification and conservatives opposing it.

But the latest development does not hail from the left.

In Illinois, a number of rural governments have taken a cue from the immigration debate by “declaring themselves sanctuary counties for gun owners,” we learn from the AP’s Don Babwin, writing in the Chicago Tribune. “The resolutions are meant to put the Democratic-​controlled Legislature on notice that if it passes a host of gun bills … the counties might bar their employees from enforcing the new laws.”

An Effingham County Board Member calls “sanctuary” an attention-​getting “buzzword,” reporting that “at least 20 Illinois counties and local officials in Oregon and Washington have asked for copies of Effingham County’s resolution.”

Now, cities and counties do not have an analogous relationship to their state governments as do states to the federal government: the states created the “United States of America,” while cities and counties are also state creations.

Yet this move is important. It shows a growing recognition of the tyrannical nature of centralized power.

And the usefulness of decentralization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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