YOU Are the Republic

We are finally at the end of President Trump’s first week in office. It has been a hectic week to say the least. In his inaugural address, the new president said the time for talk is over and it is now “time for action.” He has been true to his word. It is difficult, not just for the average citizen, but even for the news media to keep up.

Mr. Trump’s first executive order marked the official U.S. withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement. I wrote about that briefly here.

Among the highlights of the other EO’s are reinstating the “Mexico City” abortion rule, implementing much of what he’s promised to do on border security and immigration, providing “relief” from Obamacare regulations, issuing a freeze on all regulations created by agencies of the federal government, implementing a federal hiring freeze, restarting construction of the XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, expediting environmental reviews of infrastructure projects, creating a new rule requiring any pipelines built in the U.S. to be built with U.S. made steel and other metal products, and ordering a streamlining of the federal manufacturing regulations for U.S. manufacturers.

This adds up to Mr. Trump wanting to get moving quickly on infrastructure projects to get American workers back to work rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure. It won’t solve all of our earning problems, but every little bit helps.

I don’t have time to go through each one of these executive orders, nor do I have any delusions you would sit and read all of it, so I will focus on a couple and give you an overall assessment of where we are and where we are headed.

Pipelines

President Obama wanted these pipelines to be built. He did not cancel them, he delayed them so he didn’t have to deal with the political fallout. Hillary Clinton’s position was “whatever I have to tell you to get elected.” Bernie Sanders stood alone in the presidential candidate field in opposition to these pipelines. They both became a working reality the moment the polls closed on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. If you were against these pipelines, understand, no matter who won in November, you lost this battle the moment Bernie Sanders was mathematically eliminated in the Democratic Primaries. Blame the DNC and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

I’ll say this and move on. ALL pipelines leak. The Native American tribes believe their water supply will be at least tainted if we build the Dakota Access Pipeline. They deserve to be negotiated with as a sovereign nation or, at least, a state in the union. This has not happened. As usual with the U.S., the First Peoples are treated as less than second class citizens. This is how the U.S. government treats all those with less power than itself – and this behavior does not change whether Democrats, Republicans, or Whigs, or Federalists are heading up the government.

Border Security and Immigration

Easily the most impactful thing President Trump has done in his first week is the combination of two executive orders: one to build the wall along the southern border and another on far reaching immigration policies. Among bullet points in the second order are

• ·         Hiring 5,000 additional border patrol agents
• ·         10,000 new immigration officers
• ·         Creation of new detention facilities
• ·         Ending the “Catch and Release” policy and replacing it with “Catch, detain, and deport.”
• ·         Denying federal funds to sanctuary cities and “jurisdictions” (a new word we haven’t seen much of, at first blush, it appears to be a stab at denying entire states federal funds unless they cooperate with the President’s agenda)
• ·         The action also orders the Department of Homeland Security to create and maintain a list of “sanctuary jurisdictions.”
• ·         The office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to create an Office of Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens. (An ominous name, no?) This office will be compiling lists of crimes committed by immigrants. One can only assume these lists will be studied to help officials decide specific countries from which to block, reduce, or only allow super select immigrants. It also says in the order these lists are for the purpose of “better informing the public regarding safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions.” (A thinly veiled threat. This list will very soon be turned into a propaganda tool to disrupt tourism and commercial investment in these “sanctuary jurisdictions.” Why would you visit or expand your business in a place that is so unsafe? The goal is obviously to force compliance by using internal “economic sanctions” against these places.  

I have to point out at this point, had the administrations of the past ten presidents or so simply enforced the immigration laws on the books, we would not be in the position of having to decipher whether this authoritarian president believes his actions are for the good of the nation or if he has more nefarious motives. In short, we did this to ourselves.

Hope

In President Obama’s first ten days he signed nine executive orders. President Trump has signed twelve. This number may actually be thirteen, but it is difficult to get clear information at this point. He was scheduled to sign an EO ordering an investigation into his fictitious voter fraud claims yesterday afternoon, but the signing was postponed.

Bottom line, President Trump is not that far ahead of where President Obama was at this point in his presidency.

Also, one of the first EO’s President Obama signed was the order to close Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba. Eight years later it is still open. The President is not a king. Just because he orders something to happen does not mean it is feasible or doable. The wall may indeed get built. If it does, it will have little effect on illegal immigration. The more stringent steps in the accompanying order will have far more effect. Building the wall will create a few decent paying jobs for a few American workers for a few years. If we decide we don’t like it, we can always take it down once the Trump Presidency is over. Creating a few more temporary jobs?

We’ve had megalomaniac authoritarian presidents before. In the sixties and early seventies we had one who was a Democrat (Johnson) and one who was a Republican (Nixon) consecutively.

And we are still here as a sovereign and a free nation.

The Republic is bigger than one man. It is definitely bigger than this one man, no matter how many times he tries to conflate himself with the nation.

Keep in mind: YOU are the Republic.