Wed, Dec 14, 2022 |
By John Schroeder
How To Start A Civil War
Before I get to what I really want to talk about – this story amuses me endlessly.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) this week warned that California would experience an unsustainable flow of illegal immigrants once President Joe Biden reverses the Trump administration’s border policy.
“The fact is, what we’ve got right now is not working and is about to break in a post-42 world unless we take some responsibility and ownership,” the governor told ABC News Monday.
What’s funny is the man is granting “rights” to illegals left-and-right. This is not commonsense, or practicality, or any other such high-minded reality – this is pure political posturing, trying to put some space between himself and Biden as, despite his protestations to the contrary, he prepares to run for the Democratic nomination for president. Oh, it’s a stealth campaign, and he’ll probably never declare lest Biden gets out of the way, but this statement is entirely aimed at building a groundswell against a second Biden term amongst the Democrat faithful to open a door for himself.
Newsom abused his executive power massively during the worst of covid, but he was a piker compared to the likes of Gretchen Whitmer. He therefore makes a nice lead-in to what I really want to talk about – the overuse and abuse of executive power. The use of emergency powers and overuse of executive power was a theme of covid. And following the old adage “when you’re holding a hammer everything looks like a nail” it is a trend that is and will continue. Two examples in just the last 24 hours.:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass vowed Monday to hold nothing back in handling rampant homelessness after declaring a state of emergency on her first day in office.
Bass signed an emergency declaration at a news conference where she compared homelessness to a natural disaster, and promised to use non-traditional methods to curb it.
“The death rate and mass displacement of LA’s homelessness crisis exceeded those of our most tragic natural disasters like the Northridge earthquake and Hurricane Harvey,” Bass said. “It is long overdue that we have declared it an emergency.”
“The Emergency Operations Center and effective strategy against homelessness cannot be run like just any other city function,” she added. “We will increase the scale and speed of the city’s approach to homelessness by removing it from the traditional city hall way of doing things.”
In this case, you are looking at new graft piled on the old. LA’s massive homeless problem is a money pit – a black hole into which billions flow only to disappear without seeming effect. You have to know it is going into someone’s pocket, just not the pockets of the homeless on the streets. So, if Mayor Bass is going to take the homeless problem out of the “traditional city hall way of doing things” are the billions currently flowing into that system going to be cut off? Of course not – she is simply creating a new avenue into which new and additional billions can flow and line other pockets.
It is also worthy of note that she is with this declaration, also declaring that she cannot control the normal bureaucracy. She cannot make the system function as it is supposed to, so she has decided to create a new system. What makes her think it’ll go any differently? This, like Newsom’s statement, is pure political posturing, but this time it is going to pick the pockets of Angelino’s with money and put it into the pockets of faceless bureaucrats that will somehow never quite get it to the streets.
But what is not pure political posturing is this action from the outgoing Oregon governor:
Oregon governor Kate Brown said Tuesday that the state’s 17 death-row inmates will be spared execution and will instead have their sentences downgraded to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“I have long believed that justice is not advanced by taking a life, and the state should not be in the business of executing people — even if a terrible crime placed them in prison,” the outgoing Democratic governor said in a statement.
She added: “This commutation is not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the individuals on death row. Instead, it reflects the recognition that the death penalty is immoral. It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction.”
That is a flat-out abuse of power, circumventing the duly enacted law of the state legislature (signed by prior governors) and the rulings of the judicial system of the state in pursuit of personal ideology. This is the stuff of the Crown v Parliament battles that shaped the British constitution. This is an act that, like Roe v Wade, unbalances the balance of power within the three branches of government. This is how to start a civil war.
Let’s just hope it stays civil.
