Pun Salad

J.D. Tuccille is pretty steamed at recent developments in an ongoing fight, pitting Trump vs. Free Markets.

Further along in J.D.'s article there are further grounds to make a free marketeer groan:

I used to point out that Democrats seemed to believe there wasn't a single dollar in private hands that they imagined the government couldn't spend more wisely and justly.

For Trump and his toadies the null set is: private businesses which would be illegitimate to bully into submission.

Also of note:

• A worrisome trend? Or internal sabotage? Jonah Goldberg warns: Beware the New Americanism. (archive.today link)

  I went down an ugly rabbit hole the other day. In case you didn’t know, the Department of Labor is pursuing a … novel digital marketing campaign. It posts pictures of 1930s-style graphics of clean-cut young white men with captions like “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” “Your Nation Needs You!” and “American Workers First!” Maybe because I recently rewatched The Man in the High Castle, I’m a bit over-primed to find them creepy.

  The department has been doing this for a while, and I’ve largely ignored the posts, intentionally. So much of what this administration does is a kind of trolling. They want people to complain so they can then say, “See! Our critics are anti-white!” or “Look at what their TDS has caused them to get mad at now! These are inspired by Norman Rockwell!”

  But then over the weekend Labor put out this doozy with the tagline “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

  As many have noted, this was awfully close to “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer.” And then there was what seems to be a dog whistle to Which Way Western Man?, a tract by Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist William Gayley Simpson.

  So, are there some serious wannabe fascists in the Department of Labor?

  Or (alternatively) are there malicious Department of Labor employees who want to paint the Trump Administration as being fascist-adjacent, and nobody in a position to stop them has noticed?

  Neither explanation is good, but fingers crossed it's the latter.

• Those horseshoe ends keep getting closer. New Hampshire Journal notes a local pol who probably has one of those big corkboards filled with newspaper clippings, pushpins, and yards of dot-connecting red yarn: NHDem Chair Buckley Spreads Conspiracy Theory That 2024 Was Stolen From Harris.

  Before the Trump era, claims of stolen presidential elections were largely the domain of the Democratic Party.

  In 2000, prominent Democrats declared George W. Bush “selected, not elected.” Four years later, a conspiracy theory involving Diebold voting machines inspired 31 House Democrats to vote against certifying Bush’s victory in Ohio.

  In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton and allegations of Russian collusion.

  But in the wake of President Trump’s 312-226 Electoral College victory in 2024— including wins in all seven swing states — theories of election theft have largely been relegated to the fringes of the internet.

  And Ray Buckley’s social media feed.

  And darned if those new allegations don't bear serious resemblance to Trump's raves about 2020's "stolen" election.

• But are they really? Aporia Magazine wonders Why are intelligent people more liberal? The answer is obvious if you're a liberal. (I'm not, unless you stick "classical" in front.) But:

  In an 1866 debate in the House of Commons, Sir John Pakington called out a fellow member of the House, John Stuart Mill, over a statement he had made in his book Representative Government.

  Pakington noted that “we, the Conservative party, by the law of our existence, and as a matter of necessity, are what he calls the stupidest party in the State”. Mill replied: “I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant that stupid persons are generally Conservative.” He then added, “I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any Honourable Gentleman will question it.”

  While the concepts of IQ and general intelligence would not be invented for another 40 years,1 Mill was onto something. Studies consistently find that intelligent people are more socially liberal. Though the effect isn’t huge, it shows up in practically every dataset. Intelligent people are less racist, sexist and homophobic. They are less religious and less nationalistic. And they’re more likely to support free speech, immigration, sexual freedom, abortion rights, gay marriage and legalisation of marijuana.2

  The author notes that the correlation is significant, but weak: there are plenty of smart conservatives, and plenty of dumb liberals. (Like Ray Buckley.)

  But he also attributes some of the effect is due to "cognitive error". So you'll want to avoid that.

• USPS delenda est. It can't happen soon enough. Reason's Jack Nicastro reports: The new USPS electric vehicles cost $22,000 more than other electric vans.

  In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years.

  The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don't include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program.

  Oshkosh Defense, which produces rather mean-looking tactical vehicles for the American military (and has never before produced a delivery van), was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract in February 2021 to produce the NGDV for the Postal Service over 10 years. The Post details the production nightmare that ensued. After repeated delays, setbacks, and quadrupling the minimum number of electric NGDVs, thanks to a generous $3 billion subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oshkosh had only delivered 612 of 35,000 e-NGDVs by November 2025, and only 2,600 of the 16,500 internal combustion engine NGDVs.

  The word "boondoggle" appears later in the article. I wonder whose congressional district Oshkosh Defense is in.

• Happy Feet! James Lileks observes that Hep Sheiks Love That Hot Tuba. But that's just an excuse to embed:

  James calls the video "insane", and that's an understatement. What drugs were these people on back then?

Recently on the book blog:

Last month on the blog I linked to a George Will column that favorably referenced this book by Michael W. McConnell ("Stanford law professor and former federal judge"). So I put in an Interlibrary Loan request at UNH, and voila, A few days later Tufts sent it up to Durham.

Very on-topic, given the recent "No Kings" theme adopted by recent anti-Trump street protests. It is ©2020, and a continuing thought as I read was how much more McConnell could have written on his topic based on the Biden years, and (so far) Trump II.

One example of McConnell's current thoughts is seen in the amicus brief he signed onto, along with a bunch of other Constitutional scholars in support of the plaintiffs challenging the legality of Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs. One of the attorneys involved, Ilya Somin, excerpts at the Volokh Conspiracy:

What unites these amici is a shared conviction that process matters—that how we govern is as vital as what we decide. The powers to tax, to regulate commerce, and to shape the nation's economic course must remain with Congress. They cannot drift silently into the hands of the President through inertia, inattention, or creative readings of statutes never meant to grant such authority. That conviction is not partisan. It is constitutional. And it strikes at the heart of this case.

This dispute is not about the wisdom of tariffs or the politics of trade. It is about who holds the power to tax the American people. May a President, absent a clear delegation from Congress and without guidance that amounts to an intelligible principle, unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs under laws never designed for that purpose? This is not a debate over outcomes but a test of structure. It asks not what should happen, but who decides.

McConnell's book is an impressive piece of scholarship, going back to the origins of the country's governmental design. Appreciate the difficulty the Founders faced; it wasn't as if they had a lot of good examples around the world to choose from! The prime example they had to work with was: England, as ruled by George III. You might remember from your history books that they were not fans.

But (on the other hand) they had a pretty decent grasp of what powers and duties were involved in ruling a country, and many of them were steeped in the works of Montesquieu, Blackstone, Locke, et al.

That said, it's surprising they did as well as they could, given interstate rivalries and suspicions, the continuing threat of slavery, and so on. Their only major botch was their design of presidential elections, which only survived until 1804.

(Minor botch: the Constitution left unspecified about which branch of government had the power to recognize foreign countries. This was sort of "settled" in 2015's Zivotofsky v. Kerry; McConnell's not a fan, calling the SCOTUS ruling in that case "less-than-obvious".)

That said, most of today's controversies about presidential powers aren't new at all. The Constitution kept some issues ambiguous! And some of SCOTUS's decisions come in for McConnell's withering criticism. Most notably, for its relevance to current events, is Humphrey's Executor, which limited the President's power to dismiss officials in "independent" agencies. McConnell is pretty convincing there.

But as legal scholarship goes, I'm not even at the "junior dilettante" level. Many of the issues McConnell discusses are currently under debate; to his credit, McConnell deals with opposing views respectfully, but also forcefully.