During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force Starfighter radioed to an airport in England asking for permission to land. Starfighters were difficult to fly, and many crashed. Air traffic control told the pilot he was using a frequency reserved for emergencies and should switch to a different one, to which the pilot responded with the laconic bluntness of his caste, “Listen, pal, when you’ve got a Starfighter strapped to your a–, that’s an emergency.”
Whether the amusing story is true or apocryphal, it captures the fact that an emergency can be real and must be dealt with immediately or it can be an exaggerated claim cited for convenience.
Increasingly, Democrats conjure up emergencies to camouflage long-standing policies, to press electoral advantage, to extend government overreach, and to assault freedom. Incoming administrations are shocked — shocked, they tell us — to discover the appalling state of affairs left by their predecessors, and they solemnly announce that emergency remedial action is unavoidable.
Remember when President Bill Clinton got himself elected in 1992 promising a middle-class tax cut? Within weeks of winning, he found, to his lip-biting dismay, that he could not cut taxes but, er, actually had to raise them to finance a piffling (and self-defeating) economic stimulus package. Never mind that President George H.W. Bush’s recession had already ended months earlier.
Three decades later, President Biden arrived in office declaring that the country faces “four overlapping crises” — COVID-19, the economy, race, and climate. The second two of these are not crises at all, and the first two are getting better. But Democrats are using the “emergency” excuse promiscuously. Biden says, “We’re in a national emergency, and we need to act like we’re in a national emergency,” but he isn’t actually doing so. His initial plan to get 100 million people vaccinated within his first 100 days was, as we pointed out, no different from what Trump’s program would achieve. Biden would get there on autopilot, just as he got to the Oval Office. Only after we pointed this out did he order his administration to buy more vaccines to move faster.
What about other elements of his “emergency” plan? It includes more than doubling the minimum wage to $15, for which there is no excuse. The pandemic is an economic catastrophe and has killed millions of small businesses, so the last thing needed now is to double the cost of labor. It would accelerate business failures and price the neediest workers out of their jobs. Raising the minimum wage is not an emergency move at all but a tired old Democratic policy and a bonbon for unionized labor whose wages are bumped up in parallel.
Biden signed a record 17 executive orders on his first day, revealing what he thinks too urgent to await legislation (which would fail for lack of democratic support). Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made the cynicism plain, as he generally does, to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, saying Biden “can do many, many things under the emergency powers … without legislation.”
Schumer wants Biden to declare “a climate emergency” so he can ram through radical green policies that, again, cannot command popular support. If climate change really was an emergency, the public would recognize it. Instead, it knows it’s a long-term problem to be addressed with a cool head, on which America is leading the world by example already. This is why the issue always ranks low among election concerns. Democratic prescriptions for this nonemergency — shutting down America’s fossil fuel industry, banning fracking, and killing the Keystone XL pipeline do no good, while inflicting massive harm. These moves will throw people out of work, make fuel transportation more dangerous, stoke the dirtiest energy production overseas in such places as Russia, make gasoline more expensive, and raise consumer prices. In sum: less work, less money, less American strategic strength, more power to the arm of the world’s worst regimes, and, oh yes, worse emissions of greenhouse gases.
Government by emergency is a recipe for the unthinking and high-handed imposition of bad policy by an ever bigger government looking for shortcuts. President Ronald Reagan noted that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” And here was Biden on his first day reassuring the nation that “help is on the way.” One might, at this point, echo the Starfighter pilot and say that “when a country has a Democratic government strapped to its a–, that’s an emergency.”
