Way back in 2009, when he took the job of chief of staff to President Barack Obama, the country was still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008. But what seemed a calamity to pensioners, investors, and homeowners across the land looked to him like a political opportunity.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” he advised the president.
By which it is to be presumed he meant that the market meltdown and subsequent federal bailout would afford the incoming administration an excellent excuse for loading the economy down with extra taxes and social spending, such as the Affordable Care Act, and all kinds of extra regulation, such as the Dodd-Frank Act of the following year.
These things had long been on the Democrats’ wish list, only awaiting the golden opportunity of an economic meltdown to be turned into law.
Then just last year, out of office after having left poor Chicago to the tender mercies of Lori Lightfoot, Emanuel repeated his memorable words when Joe Biden became president. This time the crisis he had in view was the coronavirus pandemic, which provided the opportunity for Biden’s government, along with the Democrats in Congress, massively to increase government “stimulus” spending.
Way back in 2009, the Democratic president could only manage to get a bit less than a trillion dollars of such spending through Congress, since it was then still thought to require congressional approval.
Now, on top of the trillions approved by a party-line vote in Congress, Biden has demonstrated that his crisis-born emergency powers are supposed to extend even to the authorization of a half-trillion dollars or more of student loan relief—on the strength of nothing more than his signature on the government’s credit card voucher.
There would appear to be nothing to stop the federal giveaways from going on forever, or at least for as long as the crisis continues.
But Emanuel needs to provide a codicil or addendum to his familiar quotation. Never let a crisis go to waste, by all means. But above all: Never let a crisis go.
Biden obviously hadn’t gotten the memo about this the other day when he announced on “60 Minutes” that the pandemic was over.
Almost immediately, administration officials rushed forward, as they previously have had to do during Biden’s tenure of office, to say that the president didn’t really mean it. No, no. The crisis isn’t over. It can’t be. There are still things, such as the student loan relief, that we need it for.
Want to bet?
As long as the president has the media on his side, COVID-19—or anything else with a halfway plausible claim to being an emergency—can continue to be an emergency when it’s politically useful. Which is whenever he says it is.
By the same token, all kinds of things that reasonable people might see as rather crisis-ish—such as millions of unscreened and undocumented foreigners streaming almost unhindered over our southern border—aren’t crises if the administration and its media allies say they aren’t.
Vice President Kamala Harris has pronounced the border “secure,” after all, and that’s good enough for the obliging media.
Just as it’s not a scandal if the media say it’s not (you could ask Hunter Biden), so it’s not a crisis if the media say it’s not.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas must have thought he could change their minds by sending a few bus-loads of his state’s over-plus of immigrants to “sanctuary cities” in the north. Then, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida sent a plane-load of 50 to hyper-liberal Martha’s Vineyard.
Some hope that the virtue-signaling immigration permissivists would be shamed by having some small part of the problem they have created dumped in their own laps!
Turns out it’s the red state governors themselves who were deemed to be the lawbreakers, not those who had shown contempt for our immigration laws.
That might have seemed a bit of a reach only a few years ago, but federal law enforcement—and non-enforcement—has also found new opportunities in this extended period of crisis. Nobody but a few right-wing “extremists” bats an eye anymore when the legal apparatus of the country is weaponized for selective use against those whom the Democrats regard as their political enemies.
So long as Democrats remain in power with the media as their allies, I think we can look forward to more and better crises to come, along with the opportunities for mischief they afford.
All of which suggests that, for those of us who aren’t privileged to decide what is a crisis and what is not, the main crisis we have to worry about is the crisis of the Biden presidency itself.
