Is Trump the De-Regulator in Chief?
January 2, 2018, by Allen C. Guelzo
Was he wrong to compare his first year to Abraham Lincoln’s?
That line in a speech on December 8 by President Trump
sent a number of pundits flocking to their history textbooks for
fact-checking, especially after he followed it with the claim that,
based on the numbers, he had actually exceeded Lincoln’s first-year
total. “That’s pretty good for 10 months.”
What the pundits found was largely what they looked for. Blue State Daily’s Matthew Slivan smirked that “Trump likes to conjure comparisons to Abraham Lincoln,” but “the truth is what you’d expect: Trump is a blowhard.” Another reporter rang up former Democratic activist and chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Harold Holzer, who obligingly contributed the response, “If we hear a loud rumbling noise this Christmas season, it’s Lincoln rolling over in his grave.”
On the other hand, sending pundits to do historical research is like sending short-order cooks to do Julia Child. The results may be edible, but they won’t look much like what the recipe described.
The federal government inherited by Abraham Lincoln on his inaugural day in 1861 was a much smaller affair than our gargantuan bureaucracy. The federal statute books consisted of exactly 11 volumes, and while they teemed with regulatory provisions — directives to issue registers to coastal shipping, regulations for steamship passenger accommodations (“for the better protection of female passengers”), incorporation papers for a United States Agricultural Society, settling titles “to certain lands set apart for the use of certain half-breed Kansas Indians” — each of them might amount to no more than a thousand pages for a six-year-period.
Moreover, there were exactly fifteen formally-designated executive agencies on the day Lincoln became president (compared to 513 in 2010), including the Patent Office, the Pension Office, the Lighthouse Board, the Bureau of Weights and Measures, and the Mexican Boundary Commission, and few of them possessed regulatory authority of their own.
-go to links-
What the pundits found was largely what they looked for. Blue State Daily’s Matthew Slivan smirked that “Trump likes to conjure comparisons to Abraham Lincoln,” but “the truth is what you’d expect: Trump is a blowhard.” Another reporter rang up former Democratic activist and chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Harold Holzer, who obligingly contributed the response, “If we hear a loud rumbling noise this Christmas season, it’s Lincoln rolling over in his grave.”
On the other hand, sending pundits to do historical research is like sending short-order cooks to do Julia Child. The results may be edible, but they won’t look much like what the recipe described.
The federal government inherited by Abraham Lincoln on his inaugural day in 1861 was a much smaller affair than our gargantuan bureaucracy. The federal statute books consisted of exactly 11 volumes, and while they teemed with regulatory provisions — directives to issue registers to coastal shipping, regulations for steamship passenger accommodations (“for the better protection of female passengers”), incorporation papers for a United States Agricultural Society, settling titles “to certain lands set apart for the use of certain half-breed Kansas Indians” — each of them might amount to no more than a thousand pages for a six-year-period.
Moreover, there were exactly fifteen formally-designated executive agencies on the day Lincoln became president (compared to 513 in 2010), including the Patent Office, the Pension Office, the Lighthouse Board, the Bureau of Weights and Measures, and the Mexican Boundary Commission, and few of them possessed regulatory authority of their own.
-go to links-
No comments:
Post a Comment