Today, May 1, The Blaze published a piece on the Senate’s Wed. night rejection of a resolution which would have put a halt to the tariffs recently imposed by Donald Trump on various foreign trading partners. When voting on the motion resulted in a 49 to 49 tie, Vice President J. D. Vance cast the deciding vote in favour of Trump’s agenda. But what concerned The Blaze was that his vote was only necessary because three Republicans had chosen to support the resolution in question. Referring to those three as “the usual suspects,” the article’s implied point was that they were feckless traitors to a noble cause. In fairness to the Blaze, however, it did cite the arguments of the Republican dissenters which seemed to make a great deal of sense.
One of them, Rand Paul of Kentucky, argued that the Constitution clearly grants “the power of the purse,” including the initiation of new taxes and tariffs, to the House of Representatives whose decisions must subsequently be validated by the Senate. At the same time Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska pointed out that only a “national emergency” might exonerate a president from that process. Suggesting there was, in spite of Trump’s claims to the contrary, no such emergency, she too voted in favour of the Democrats’ resolution.
Oddly, in spite of its implied disdain for the Republicans under consideration, The Blaze offered no rebuttal to their constitutional arguments. How many other members of Trump’s party, one wonders, while generally agreeing with his goals, are equally disaffected with his manner of pursuing them but simply too cowardly to speak up? While I am hardly qualified to pontificate on the American Constitution, surely there are those able to comment categorically on, for example, the legitimacy of Rand Paul’s statements. Moreover it seems to me that the 3 Republicans who sided with the Democrats in seeking to admonish Trump were not so much “traitors” as people of Integrity who felt it necessary to vote with their Conscience. It is more of such that we need if we are ever to get beyond the seething hatred that separates Left from Right in this truly dystopian era.