Bernie Sanders & Co. must like its internal polling. Not only is it folks in Iowa that the candidate will likely win in the caucuses there (and raising expectations late in the game), but the staffers are already planning to win the general election. Somebody show these people a calendar. And note that the first vote in the primaries hasn't been cast yet. And that November is nearly a year away.
Over-confidence, meet Bernie Sanders. Get this: The Washington Post, not exactly a conservative rag, reported this week that the Sanders campaign has been putting together executive orders on the fly--the better to show how President Sanders would govern.
Apparently Hillary Clinton was right, and Sen. Sanders' people know it: He doesn't have a lot of people who like him in Congress. So he might think his best chance at governing would be through executive orders. From The Post:
"Aides have presented Sanders with a list of possible executive actions, including more than a dozen options for reversing President Trump's immigration policy, such as lifting the cap on the number of refugees accepted into the United States and immediately halting border wall construction. Another option is the reinstatement of an Obama-era program that granted legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
"The document reviewed by The Washington Post shows how the Sanders campaign has already begun extensive planning for how the senator would lead the country in his first days as president if he won the Democratic nomination and defeated Trump in November. Many of the proposals Sanders has floated on the campaign trail do not have support from congressional Republicans and are opposed by some Democrats, so a willingness to move forward without congressional approval could determine whether many of his policies are enacted."
And they say the current president of the United States is obsessed with power. At least Donald Trump has a party to answer to. NB: Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat, though he's running for the nomination of that party.
The Post says the list of "potential executive orders" could include things like legalizing marijuana across the board by ordering the Justice Department to take that action. Also, there are plans for an order to declare climate change a national emergency. And to, get this, ban the exportation of crude oil.
The United States became a net exporter of oil only in the last few years, as fracking freed energy sources below the ground. Now that we're not dependent on Middle Eastern oil, a President Sanders would reverse that? It would have to take an executive order, because no Congress would agree to such a thing.
While Joe Biden takes heat for declaring that he would work with Republicans should he be elected, as he always has in his career, Bernie Sanders has to find a way to get around not only GOP members, but Democrats in the Congress. Somebody explain again how his poll numbers got this high.
Last month, a woman in Iowa asked Sen. Sanders a question about how he'd govern. She asked, "What are you going to do about the partisanship that prevents any good Democrat from getting anywhere in Congress right now."
Bernie Sanders' answer:
"We're going to run a different type of presidency."
Or so he plans.
Editorial on 02/01/2020