By now you will all have received the happy news that the new God-Emperor of the United States won’t immediately be imposing brutal new tariffs on Canadian exports. Canadians will have to decide for themselves whether the past two weeks of panic, threats and furious internecine struggle were unnecessary, or whether our frantic efforts to cajole the Emperor and his court were actually successful behind the scenes. But the objective, disinterested takeaway must be that something has gone very badly awry with American government of laws-not-men.
One president leaves, firing off a burst of last-minute executive orders (some of them farcical), pardons and commutations, and new regulatory “guidance” to federal agencies. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s renowned regulation-watcher Clyde Crews has reported, befogged President Joe Biden has added 872 pages of new quasi-law to the U.S. Federal Register since Jan. 1 of this calendar year. Meanwhile, another president swoops in after explaining the myriad ways in which he intends to alter the fundamental character of the state on Day 1.
No one, with the exception of a few cranky libertarians like Crews, displays even the dimmest sense that this is an improper degree of power to be wielded by an official who is supposed to be executing laws rather than making them. The long interim period between the election of a U.S. chief executive and his inauguration ought, in theory, to help the American state achieve certainty and smoothness in the transition. What it delivers is the opposite: the “midnight” period between presidencies becomes a period of terror and unpredictability, hateful to the whole globe.
Trump’s re-inherited presidential powers, coupled with his authority over a now-dominant legislative party, created a perceived risk that several points of Canada’s gross domestic product were stacked precariously on the felt of a roulette table. And yet Canada’s not even in the direct line of fire! Imagine being a businessman or farmer actually living under, being literally subject to, such diabolical personal rule.
History’s judgment is bound to show that presidents Barack Obama and Biden, owing to their unabashed and largely unchallenged use of presidential solo rule-making, were little more than midwives to the openly imperial Donald Trump phenomenon. It’s enough to make you shed a tear, within the mere shadow of the United States, for the great and good people once promised “a republic, if you can keep it.”
National Post
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