Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but for all the damage he inflicted during his trial monarchical run, he might as well be President today. After gutting regulatory agencies, slashing taxes for corporate America, adding $2 trillion and rising to the federal deficit, his judicial appointments have acted as mini legislatures repealing laws that have reinforced a contracting average US life expectancy, deteriorating healthcare for millions of Americans, thus shifting costs back to most of us while saving business America billions. To be accurate, some of this can be traced back to several administrations, where antitrust laws were largely ignored and anti-consumer protection was shoved aside to allow mergers and acquisitions that should never have been formed, creating de facto price-escalating cartels. Personal health and safety have also become sacrificial lambs.
In a Trumpian era where medical doctors and PhD scientists have fallen into disrespect and increasing irrelevancy – “out of touch elites” – Trump’s judicial appointments seem to have elevated the Bible over the Constitution and relegated our most trusted and trained experts as also-rans, easily questioned and reversed by evangelical-driven judges (selected by forum shopping plaintiffs), then supported by unethical but “God-fearing” appellate judges, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. This deforestation of expertise is well-explained by Amy Howe, writing for the January 17th SCOTUSblog.com:
“It has been nearly 40 years since the Supreme Court indicated in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts should defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. After more than three-and-a-half hours of oral argument on Wednesday, it seemed unlikely that the rule outlined in that case, known as the Chevron doctrine, will survive in its current form. A majority of the justices seemed ready to jettison the doctrine or at the very least significantly limit it.
“The court’s ruling could have ripple effects across the federal government, where agencies frequently use highly trained experts to interpret and implement federal laws. Although the doctrine was relatively noncontroversial when it was first introduced in 1984, in recent years conservatives – including some members of the Supreme Court – have called for it to be overruled.
“The plea to overturn the Chevron doctrine came to the court in two cases challenging a rule, issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service, that requires the herring industry to bear the costs of observers on fishing boats. Applying Chevron, both the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld the rule, finding it to be a reasonable interpretation of federal law.
“The fishing companies came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in on the rule itself but also to overrule Chevron. Roman Martinez, representing one group of fishing vessels, told the justices that the Chevron doctrine undermines the duty of courts to say what the law is and violates the federal law governing administrative agencies, which similarly requires courts to undertake a fresh review of legal questions. Under the Chevron doctrine, he observed, even if all nine Supreme Court justices agree that the fishing vessels’ interpretation of federal fishing law is better than the NMFS’s interpretation, they would still be required to defer to the agency’s interpretation as long as it was reasonable. Such a result, Martinez concluded, is ‘not consistent with the rule of law.’”
But it is consistent with the divine inspiration that stood/stands behind the reversal of Roe vs Wade (the Dobbs decision) and the challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-long approval of mifepristone, a commonly used pill taken as a medication abortion. The forum-shopped Texas federal judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, held that the FDA's 2000 approval and subsequent actions were likely unlawful. The case is now under consideration by the US Supreme Court, but after oral arguments in late March, experts are predicting a rejection or severe curtailing of the Chevron doctrine.
The Court is also facing challenges to the jurisdiction and scope of several federal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, etc. But was there a ray of hope as a 7-2 Supreme Court ruling on May 18th actually reversed a lower court decision, thus supporting that rulemaking from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was not unconstitutional?
However, what we are seeing generally is exemplified by lax enforcement of federal antitrust laws, manifest throughout our economy, but the impact on the cost and quality of healthcare has been monumental. As recounted by Mike Cummings in the April 24th Yale News, discussing a faculty survey: “‘It is plainly clear that there has been underenforcement of antitrust laws in the hospital sector,’ said study co-author Zack Cooper, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health and of economics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences… We show that about 20% of hospital mergers from 2002 to 2020 could have been easily predicted to increase concentration, lessen competition, and raise prices… ‘Since 2000, hospital prices have grown faster than prices in any other sector of the economy,’ Cooper added. ‘The average price of an inpatient admission is now nearly $25,000. We need to be doing more to preserve competition in U.S. hospital markets.’”
Government agencies have protected us from massive dumping of chemical waste into our air and water, the use of chemicals (like DDT) that are severe toxins to a whole lot more than just insects, but Trump’s war on government agencies, his pledge for any future administration if he is elected, has degraded and will continue to degrade the health and safety of every American… while big fat corporate miscreants will become bigger, fatter corporate malefactors. Indeed, under the title Trump’s War on Government Will Take Public Health Back a Century, writing for the May 14th The New Republic, Abdullah Shihipar notes:
“At the heart of the conservative push to defang federal agencies is a belief that the government should not impede the ability of companies to make a profit, and that health and safety are an individual responsibility. But public health regulations exist for a painfully obvious reason: Environmental and societal factors are necessarily beyond an individual’s control, and they can lead to bad health outcomes. You can eat well and exercise but ultimately still develop cancer from living a few miles from a plastics factory. In fact, as Jessie Singer argues in There Are No Accidents, many of the major causes of death in the U.S.—car accidents, overdoses, and other things we consider tragedies or accidents—are the result of negligent policy. Regulatory agencies like the FDA are the ones we task to fix, improve, and maintain that policy.”
Indeed, personal reproductive care has so deteriorated after Dobbs that “more young adults seek sterilization [, and] Vasectomy and tubal ligation rates went up among those 30 and younger, study finds.” Associated Press, May 14th. For a party that claims to foster individual rights and freedom from “it’s nobody’s business” very personal choice, MAGA is the most intrusive party in personal freedom in recent history. Helpless and unrepresented, many young Americans have given up, no longer trusting the government… and resorting to unnecessary and drastic measures.
I’m Peter Dekom, and if MAGA world looks like an autocracy, smells like an autocracy, talks and acts like an autocracy… and if you do not care about delegating your most personal choices to an autocracy… then… prepare!
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