The ballroom blitz

The Supreme Court declined to halt Donald Trump’s ballroom construction in a ruling this week that hinged on the plaintiff’s lack of standing. In a dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Administration’s actions were “likely unlawful.”

When cases reach the Supreme Court level, I tend to view standing as something that the majority can often game. In a great many cases, it seems that if the majority doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, they can simply find that there was no standing, and - poof - the case goes away. On the other hand, the same majority can look at different angles to find standing if it’s a case that they want to rule on.

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I have a couple of big questions for the Supreme Court about this case. First, who does have standing to stop the destruction of the White House and the lawless construction of the new ballroom? The follow-up is: what good are laws if no one has the power to sue and force them to be upheld?

The second question is the more important one. John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We are seeing the truth of that statement being played out in front of us right now. The Trump Administration is running wild and ignoring laws while the institutions that were designed to put the brakes on such abuses of power are systematically skirted or dismantled. I lay a lot of the blame for this on congressional Republicans who are too cowardly to stand up to the president and the Republican base.

The real problem is the voters, however. Not only Republican primary voters, but the voters who returned Trump to power after January 6 and after he explicitly campaigned on abusing his office if he was re-elected. The bottom line is that Trump is running amok and destroying the Republic because voters refused to hold him and his party accountable.

The greatest generation we aren’t.

A case can be made about why a ballroom should be built for state functions, but Trump’s actions are a case study in how not to handle government projects. The saga includes no-bid contracts for cronies, ignoring laws, cost overruns, subterfuge, outright lies, and frequently moving goalposts.

The ballroom may be a small piece of Trump’s corruption in the grand scheme of things, but it is magnificently symbolic of all that is wrong with his Administration. Trump was elected to fight inflation and high prices, but he is focused on the completion of a luxury vanity project that few Americans will ever see the inside of. Rather than following the constitutional process to appropriate and authorize the ballroom through Congress, Trump decreed the job with kingly authority and lied about his intentions from Day One, including falsely saying that the ballroom “won't interfere with the current building. It'll be near it but not touching it.” Days after making that statement, the president unilaterally demolished the East Wing.

The ballroom isn’t the end, either. Trump is already planning to start work on an arch monument, satirically dubbed the “Arc de Trump,” in a matter of weeks. Congress has not approved this construction either. If the president can rule by decree and appropriate his own funds, why do we need Congress?

Precedent is being set with the destruction of the White House and the construction of the ballroom. If Donald Trump can raze the East Wing and raise a ballroom in its place without congressional authorization, the next president can take equal and opposite action. Maybe the next Democratic president can demolish the ballroom and build a combination drag queen theme park and abortion clinic or something.

I’m not saying I support this, but turnabout is fair play. Frankly, I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat in which federal buildings and historical landmarks are demolished and replaced every time we change presidents. It’s much better to use the constitutional process and involve Congress.

There is a reason that the founders and preceding generations of legislators set up processes for how to spend federal money and replace government buildings with other ones. A big reason is that the whims of one president can be easily replaced by another, and things get whipsawed back and forth.

If Donald Trump wanted a ballroom, he should have gone to Congress and asked for money, just as every president before him has done. That’s how our system is supposed to work. After all, the Constitution explicitly gives the House power over the federal purse in Article I, Section 7.

But Donald Trump wants to have his ballroom without going through Congress, and frankly, that needs to be an issue in the midterms. Let Trump and the Republicans defend the president’s gilded dance hall to voters who are worried about the rising costs of food and energy.

Trump’s ballroom fetish is about as populist as Marie Antoinette, and the Republican defense of the structure while Americans contemplate how to pay for their next tank of gas is akin to saying, “Let them eat cake.”

From the Racket News

Imperialism if you can keep it

 The United States had an important moment this week. The Trump Administration announced a deal with Venezuela that would purportedly give the US access to an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, more than triple the US reserves.

There are a lot of questions about the deal. These range from whether Venezuela actually has that much oil to whether the Venezuelan oil is worth very much in terms of converting the dark goo into gasoline. In any case, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but its infrastructure is in dire need of repair and upgrade, and its oil is of the heavy, sour variety that yields less gasoline but is well-suited to Gulf Coast refineries.

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The most important question, however, is what the heck are we doing?

This all started with a daring, special operations raid last winter that captured Venezuela’s dictator-in-chief, Nicholas Maduro. Since then, we have left the regime in place, albeit with a different figurehead at the top. Delcy Rodriguez, vice president under Chavez, stepped into the top spot with American blessing and has proven to be more compliant, if no less authoritarian, than the previous dictator.

Contrary to the hopes of Venezuelans and human rights activists, our focus over the past nine months has been on assuming control of the Venezuelan oil industry rather than regime change or spreading democracy. The raid seems to have been all about the oil, rather than truth, justice, and the American way.

There’s a word for what Trump is doing in Venezuela, and that word is “imperialism,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas.” Military action to replace a dictator and gain control over Venezuelan oil is an almost verbatim real-life restatement of the definition.

The word “imperialism” has been overused a lot in recent decades, but at times it does apply. There were charges of imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq, although Afghanistan had little of value and we didn’t keep Iraqi oil. But when a country is attacked and its resources taken under duress, it is one of those times when the word applies without stretching the concept.

For most countries, the allure of imperialism went out with World War II, if not the 19th century. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of the exceptions, and Americans should be disturbed at the fact that Trump’s foreign policy is becoming more explicitly Putinesque.

This was not without warning, however. The concept is perfectly in keeping with the theories about Trump’s geopolitical doctrine of dividing the world into spheres of influence controlled by us, Russia, and China. If these theories are correct, Taiwan should brace for the next shoe to drop.

Marco Rubio, the anti-communist son of Cuban immigrants, should be particularly ashamed. For the Secretary of State, the metamorphosis from advocate of Latin American freedom to defender of Trump’s exploitation of the Venezuelan people marks a decade-long decline from a top presidential candidate in 2016 to a MAGA yes-man.

And then there’s the fact that the deal also gives the federal government, specifically the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the joint US-Venezuelan venture. So, in addition to being imperialist, the deal is also socialist, granting the government yet another ownership interest in a growing list of nationalized American companies.

Chevron has announced an investment into Venezuela, but as Republicans used to believe, government intrusion into the market may turn out to be detrimental. Aside from the legal questions, oil companies may question the wisdom and prospects of competing with a government-back entity.

It goes without saying that this is all without either congressional approval or oversight. The Senate has the constitutional duty to ratify treaties, but it’s unlikely that any treaty is forthcoming. Trump is almost always long on announcements and short on implementation.

The deal is already unpopular with the people of Venezuela. Trump avoided a prolonged war in Venezuela by replacing the head of the regime, but if it the plan doesn’t collapse under its own weight, it’s entirely possible that American soldiers will have to be deployed to protect US oil interests in the country, because ultimately imperialism is about using force to take what belongs to someone else, and often the victims don’t like that status quo.

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Election Follies

 There are a couple of oddities in the current election season. Strangely enough, the Alaska Senate race, where two Dan Sullivans are competing against Democrat Mary Peltola is not the oddest of the odd. 

Alaska’s incumbent senator, Republican Dan S. Sullivan, is locked in a reelection battle with Peltola, the Democratic challenger, as well as another Republican Dan Sullivan. 

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Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, emerged as a strong enough candidate to earn a spot on the November ballot after placing third in the state’s nonpartisan, jungle primary. Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, finished second behind Peltola.

Republicans are crying foul and blaming Democrats for playing shady tricks, but both the Peltola campaign and Dan J. Sullivan deny coordinating with each other. The state Division of Elections removed the non-senator Sullivan from the ballot, saying that his campaign was designed to cause confusion, but he was restored by a judge. Sullivan says that he is running in good faith, despite the fact that he voted for Peltola in her congressional bids.

What makes this even funnier is that this is not the first time that Dan Sullivan has been on the same ballot as another Dan Sullivan. When Senator Sullivan was first elected in 2014, yet another Republican Dan Sullivan was running for lieutenant governor. That third Dan Sullivan has endorsed Senator Dan Sullivan in the current race. 

As a footnote, Senator Sullivan trailed Peltola by more than 10,000 votes in the primary. Even assuming that all Dan J. Sullivan voters would have voted for Senator Sullivan if Dan J. wasn’t on the ballot, his 3,847 votes would not have changed the outcome. I do wonder how many of the Senator’s voters intended to vote for Dan J. 

You might wonder what could be more weird than the saga of the Alaskan Dan Sullivans, and the answer would be found in Nebraska, where Democrats are fighting to not have a candidate. No, that is not a typo. 

In the Cornhusker State, Democrats are fighting a legal battle to keep their primary winner off the ballot and not have a candidate in the general election. The backstory is that when Nebraska Democrats held their Senate primary, they overwhelmingly chose Cindy Burbank over William Forbes, a Trump-supporting, pro-life candidate who, in a parallel to Alaska, some Democrats consider to be a plant. For his part, Forbes says he is a registered Democrat even though he voted for Trump multiple times and attended a training session for Republican candidates. 

Burbank promised during the campaign to withdraw from the race if nominated in order to support independent candidate Dan Sullivan. No, I’m just kidding. The Nebraska candidate is a Dan, but his last name is Osborn. Osborn is not a Democrat and has rejected both parties, but he has strong support among Nebraska Democrats. As an aside, I’ll also note that promising to withdraw or resign is a strategy that I’d love to see more candidates use. 

To make a long story short (too late!), when Burbank filed to withdraw from the race, Republicans sued to place Forbes, the alleged ringer, on the ballot, while Democrats fought to keep him off. The case hinged on the wording of the Nebraska statute, which stated that ballot vacancies “may be filled,” but also says, “the vacancy shall be filled by the majority vote of the proper committee of the same political party.”

The case was decided this week when a state judge threw out Forbes’ lawsuit. Per Courthouse News Service, the judge held that the word “may” gave the party discretion on whether to replace its nominee, but the “shall” dictated the procedure to follow if the decision to replace was in the affirmative. 

Barring any further developments, Osborn will face incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts in November. The only recent poll is one sponsored by the Osborn campaign, and that one shows a 47-47 tie. 

It remains to be seen whether Osborn can upset Ricketts, but it is a certainty that he has a much better chance of doing so without a Democratic nominee in the race. That is true even if the Democrat is a DINO (Democrat in name only), who only entered the race to sow confusion. Every vote will matter in this race. 

This is an important election year. The outcome of these and other races matters a great deal, but despite that - or perhaps because of it - there seems to be ample weirdness in the electorate. File these stories away for use in trivia contests a decade or so from now. 

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DEPT OF ED COMPARES TRUMP TO HITLER A deleted post by the Department of Education featured a movie clip of Winston Churchill talking about Hitler, followed by a montage of Trump pictures. This creates the opportunity for a multitude of jokes that can easily write themselves. I’m starting to agree with abolishing the DOE.

Making frenemies

 Apparently, one war isn’t enough, because over the weekend, Donald Trump started new wars of trade and words with two of our closest allies. The president has long had a habit of alienating allies and fawning over dictators. We saw that again this week.

First, Trump distanced the US from South Korea and crowed about his relationship with Kim Jong Un in a move that will offend both South Korea and Japan. Just a day before joint exercises with the South Korean military were supposed to begin, Trump abruptly announced that the maneuvers would be “substantially reduced.” That the exercise continued at all was due only to the stated fact that it was too late to cancel them entirely.

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Trump was apparently angry that South Korea has not joined in his Qixotic battle against Iran, but the fact that there is no coalition of the willing rests on the shoulders of Trump and Netanyahu, who decided to start the war on their own without consulting allies, much less expending the diplomatic capital required to build a coalition.

There has long been speculation that Trump would withdraw American forces from the Korean peninsula. While no such announcement has been made, the rift makes that a real possibility. This is the opposite of projecting American power and would benefit China and North Korea, while creating further problems with South Korea and Japan. It might also spur South Korea to become a nuclear power.

Bases in South Korea are not just about the defense of Korea. They are part of an interlocking line of defense that guards the entire Pacific region against Chinese encroachment. When that line is weakened, China gains an advantage.

Trump’s decision was likely economic as well as sour grapes over Iran. South Korea is an economic competitor as well as a trading partner. The Trump Administration said last year that the nation had promised to invest $350 billion in the US. Politico reports that frustration over the pace of that investment, equal to about one-fifth of the South Korean economy, may have played a role in Trump’s decision, but it was never a real possibility that South Korea would export that much wealth to the US.

Economics definitely played a role in the recent rift with Canada. Trump implemented 50-percent tariffs on a variety of Canadian goods on Saturday after trade talks broke down. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pledged to fight back with retaliatory tariffs “dollar for dollar.” The current US-Canada trade deal was signed by - wait for it - Donald Trump in 2018.

As an aside here, I’m going to point out that Trump made a de facto admission that tariffs raise costs for consumers when he suspended beef tariffs in order to “get prices down.” Again, this was at the same time that he slapped new tariffs on Canada, as well as at the same time that the federal government is refunding tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.

At this point, Canada had little choice. It is readily apparent that deals made with Donald Trump are not worth the paper they are printed on. A deal can be inked and signed, and Trump will change his mind and demand more concessions five minutes later.

Trump is a bully, and the way to handle bullies is to stand up to them. I’m surprised that our allies have not tried this before now. I don’t think that the Canadian model will be the last time such resistance happens.

At this point, some may accuse me of rooting against my country. Don’t confuse the president with the country. America is my country, right or wrong, but that does not mean that I have to support the actions of its government if I believe them to be unwise or immoral.

Part of loving your country is wanting the best for it. And like a parent who wants the best for his children, that does not mean supporting everything the children do. Tough love includes keeping the kids accountable when they make bad and self-destructive choices, while nudging them back towards the straight and narrow.

What we are seeing now are not policies that will make America great again. We are seeing policies that will make America irrelevant. If our allies can’t trust us to have their backs on security issues, but do trust us to backstab them on trade deals, that’s a recipe for creating an international order that bypasses or excludes the United States.

The fact that American voters have embraced Trump and his quasi-isolationist ideas not once but twice means that we can’t be trusted not to go further down this road in the future, if not in 2028, then sometime beyond. That means that much of the damage that Trump has done to American prestige, power, and relationships might never be repaired. At best, it will take decades to recover.

And we still have two years to go.

From the Racket News 

JD Vance and curse of the cheap goods

 

Vice President JD Vance is the current frontrunner in the 2028 Republican presidential primary, but as with Trump, many Republicans aren’t very excited about the option. This may be why there was a hatchet job on the veep over the weekend in the form of a video clip in which Vance shows his economic ignorance. 

In the short clip, which comes from a longer video interview in 2023, Vance takes the positions that Americans are paying too little for consumer goods and that the dollar’s reserve currency status is an albatross around the neck of the country.

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“I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America,” Vance opined. “I think there’s a good argument that reserve currency is akin to coal in Appalachia; it’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply, right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last 15 or so years, even before that. We can just borrow, basically in an unlimited way, because we have the reserve currency. That’s a massive subsidy to incurring debt. The debt is cheaper, even in a raised interest rate environment.” 

“So we have this massive subsidy to cheap debt to the American consumer,” he continued. “That’s good, right? Consuming is important, especially food, medicine, and things like that, but I think it’s a massive tax on American producers.”

Keep in mind that this clip apparently originated at a time when prices were already high due to inflation, but Vance was concerned that American consumers were still consuming too cheaply. In a time of rising costs, that sentiment is not going to play well with voters. 

More insidious is Vance’s dislike for the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 established the dollar’s global currency status, and that has been a tremendous boon to the US economy. Transactions all around the world are conducted in dollars as the benchmark currency. This has contributed to American economic strength and helped consumers enrich themselves through the strong dollar. 

Vance is correct that the global dollar has helped the US with cheaper borrowing costs, and that includes the government as well as consumers. The flip side to Vance’s argument is that if borrowing costs go up, interest on the federal debt, currently edging out defense spending as the third largest budget item, will grow as a share of the federal budget and crowd out other items. Without reserve currency status, we might ultimately lose the ability to finance the federal debt at any cost, triggering a Greece-like debt crisis. As I write this, 30-year Treasury yields, the cost of financing the national debt, have risen to their highest level since just before the 2008 financial crisis.

The kicker is that if the US enters an economic downturn because of a debt crisis, much of the rest of the world will follow, thanks to the interlinked global economy. When American consumers buy less, that impacts the economies of countries that export to us. To some extent, that slowdown is already happening due to Trump’s tariffs and trade wars. Our trading partners are looking for new markets as exports to the US drop. Those who can’t have experienced slowing or contracting economies.

The interesting thing for those defending Vance’s view is that our main geopolitical adversaries are also pushing to dethrone the dollar. Russia and China have long been jealous of the advantage that the US gets from the dollar’s global status, and they have been working to push alternatives for years. 

If Russia and China think they stand to benefit from taking the dollar down a few notches, why is someone like Vance pushing the idea? In another 2023 clip, Vance explained his thinking to Fox News.

“While it does have benefits, King Dollar actually has a downside for American manufacturers,” Vance said. “I think our manufacturers could benefit quite a bit. What the reserve currency does, the good thing, is that it means that things are a lot cheaper here in this country. If you travel overseas, you can buy more with the American dollar. The bad thing is it’s really bad for our exporters.”

In essence, Vance’s argument for jettisoning reserve currency status is the same as Trump’s argument for tariffs. They think imports are too cheap, and they want to make foreign goods more expensive so that American consumers will buy more American-made goods. 

The fundamental problem with this view is that the decline of American manufacturing is a myth. US manufacturing output has remained strong for decades, but there are two caveats. Manufacturing jobs have declined due to automation, and manufacturing has shrunk as a share of the GDP as the world transitions to an information-based economy. As with trying to shift aircraft carriers to steam catapultsand build a new class of already-obsolete battleships, the Trump Administration’s manufacturing policy seeks to return us to the past, but you can’t turn back the clock.

Interestingly, Donald Trump seems to realize the importance of maintaining the dollar’s reserve currency status. In yet another video, the president said, “If you want to go to third-world status, lose your reserve currency.”

It isn’t often that I agree with Donald Trump, but this is one of those times. I just wish Trump were more consistent on the issue. Trump may not want to dump the dollar’s global status, but he has advocated for a weaker, inflationary dollar to bolster his protectionist schemes. 

To give Republicans some credit, a lot of the flak came from the last remaining conservatives. Our old buddy, Erick Erickson, was very critical of Vance on both foreign policy and domestic issues, at one point likening the vice president to Candace Owens. Ouch.

If JD Vance gets his way, rather than making America great again, his economic policies are likely to pave the way for American economic decline. As a general rule, we shouldn’t pursue the same economic policies that Russia and China are advocating for, and we shouldn’t elect politicians whose ideas mirror theirs, whether it be dethroning King Dollar or cutting off aid to Ukraine. 

It’s a good thing that the chances of America electing another Republican in 2028 will be near zero after four years of Trump’s mismanagement of the country. 

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CLOWNS TO THE LEFT, JOKERS TO THE RIGHT A new CBS News poll showed that 58 percent of Democrats view socialism positively compared to 38 percent for capitalism. But even 54 percent of Republicans approve of price controls. Democrats were viewed as weak, while Republicans were viewed as extreme. 

The poll also shed light on how the parties view socialism, with Democrats stressing “equality and fairness and public services,” and Republicans equating the term with “government control.” That ties in nicely with what I wrote in “Socialism vs. socialism” a few weeks ago. 

The sad takeaway here is that neither party is very interested in free markets at this point. 

SOUTH KOREA SLAP The Trump Administration called off joint exercises with South Korea as Trump wistfully recalled his good times with Kim Jong Un. 

BOAT STRIKES OUT An intelligence assessment reviewed by the Washington Postfound that Trump’s attacks on boats had “failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire.” That’s a poor result for acts that may have been war crimes, or since we aren’t at war, just plain crimes. 

ONLY THREE STATES approve of Trump in a new Newsweek poll. Can you guess them?

ZOIKS AND JINKIES For your viewing pleasure, check out this video of Scooby Doo and the gang investigating the reflecting pool mystery.

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