One thing that quickly emerges in any news story about the activities of the Trump administration is the fact that many regulations are being rolled back. Whether it’s the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, or many other agencies involved in protecting Americans from fraud and incompetence, Trump’s “shoot first and ask questions later” approach to governing is threatening many of the safeguards we have come to take for granted.
The classic conflict between liberal and conservative viewpoints can be oversimplified into a debate over the size and scope of the federal government. An underlying aspect of this debate could be phrased as, “Who gets to tell me what to do?” But when you look closer, some of the inconsistencies become obvious.
For instance, if you want to make a Texan mad, tell him he can’t build something he wants on his private property. But if you want to make him even madder, let his neighbor build something the Texan doesn’t want on the neighbor’s private property.
Our current frenzy about the solar farm being constructed here is an example of this dilemma. The company building the project has followed all the regulations in place, but hey, Texas is business- friendly, so there aren’t that many. Balancing our own needs with the needs of others is a developmental milestone that many of us never achieve.
As a student of human nature, I know that we are all vulnerable to the hypocrisy of self-centered reasoning. But one of the characteristics we have come to expect in our leaders is the ability to recognize the suffering of those who may be very far removed from any of the leader’s personal experiences.
Up until now, for example, the fact that a leader is wealthy has not precluded his having concern for the plight of those less fortunate. My beef with conservatives (one of several) is that they seem to believe that poor people have somehow engineered their own “failure” by not working hard enough, and therefore should not be afforded any protections or economic supports to help them navigate our wealthbased society. Regulations limiting discrimination, for example, whether in housing, employment or education, are thereby opposed by conservatives like the ones in office now.
Government support for those with lower incomes is somehow seen as “taking” money from the wealthy and “giving” it to people who don’t deserve it, as if rich people don’t owe anything to the society that enabled their success. This administration will tolerate tax evasion by the wealthy and vow to come after the little guy. I’d love to see the tax returns of Trump, Musk, and all the cabinet members; I bet the little guy paid more.
Conservative, pro-business groups only want more regulations when it helps the bottom line. They might want stricter government actions such as tax breaks for certain industries and mandates for government investment in industries that are favored. Texas is an instructive example of this, where government investment in oil and gas industries is rampant alongside restrictive controls over competitive industries such as renewable energy.
On a national scale, consider the billions of dollars of federal contracts that our acting President Musk has in place, which seem to be safe from the chopping block that is the destiny of many other federal programs that don’t benefit him, you know, like food programs in schools and health insurance for folks with pre-existing conditions. These are the guys that jump in the lifeboat first because their company manufactured it.
REGULATIONS, CONTINUED
The way the dreaded “DEI” issue is being handled provides another good example of hypocrisy. The Trump administration seems to have decided that not only should there not be any formal programs to support women and minorities at the “expense” of white males, but that historical archives should basically remove any mention of minority status or even remove the people themselves.
Did you ever hear of General Colin Powell or MLB baseball legend Jackie Robinson? They were “scrubbed” from the archives of the Department of Defense since Pete Hegseth decided they were only noteworthy due to their Blackness. While some of these actions may end up being reversed in the long run, they reveal that much more than just current DEI programs are the target of the new regulations. Is it racist to refuse to acknowledge race?
One final word on the way Trump and his cronies are putting a thumb on the scale: the Constitution set up our government as a three-part system so that each branch could balance any tendency for the other branches to grab inordinate power.
However, the regulations, both those that are being ignored and those that are being invented, are being done by Executive Orders without any oversight by the Legislature. The only protests being made are coming from We, the People, who are filing lawsuits left and right to bring some kind of order to the reckless process being enacted by the Trump administration.
It looks as if Trump may be on the brink of announcing that he is not bound by the verdicts and rulings of the courts, as well as the Legislature, and that is when the Constitutional crisis will occur. You must decide for yourself if you want a government that can declare that it has absolute power over you, using regulations only for its own benefit.
Susan Hull is a retired clinical psychologist, horse trainer and Independent voter. She believes rules and regulations are what have allowed us to live together as successfully as we have for 250 years, and that now is not the time to adopt a completely new system that looks a lot like the monarchy we got rid of back then.
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