The Legal Status of Trump’s Two to One Regulation Exchange
In the hearing for Rod Rosenstein for Deputy Attorney General, our Senator Diane Feinstein asked about the legal status of Trump’s two-for-one sale of government regulations. This requires that two regulations in a Department be cancelled for every new one that is instituted. It had never occurred to me, or mentioned before on the news, that this kind of order might be illegal, since each Department has legal missions under law. I assume the two-for-one trade is not written into any of these missions.
One of the main goals of this blog is to add numerical data and math to gain perspectives on issues. If Trump’s two-for-one sale is legal, he can be criticized from the alt-right for not upping the ante, say to three-two-one, or five-to-one, or ten-two-one. As a youngster, the book “One, Two, Three … Infinity” by theoretical physicist George Gamow in 1947, was very popular. So why can’t Trump consider that ALL government regulations that cost businesses more than a single dollar be canceled, even if you don’t propose a new regulation. This is, of course, a reductio ad absurdum, or is it? The Republicans will never have a greater dominance of the federal government, except in a short time when Justice Neil Gorsuch gets confirmed to the Supreme Court, and after the 2018 midterm election, when so many Democratic Senate positions are up for reelection.
Trump was elected in part because voters wanted the government run by a businessman. He also wrote “The Art of the Deal”. Why would he settle for his own first offer, instead of renegotiating it upward?
