The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

Hey, Trump, you’re not the boss of me

Nor are you the boss of the governors. The Constitution says so. Despite your weird claim that it gives you “total” authority.

You wrongly asserted: “The president of the United States calls the shots. They [the governors] can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States.”

Asked what part of the Constitution gives him this king-like authority over whether he can overrule the governors in deciding when to reopen the country, he embarrassed himself by saying, “Numerous provisions.” Lucky for Trump, no one asked him to name them.

His version of the Constitution must not include the Tenth Amendment that reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Or perhaps when he took a civics course, he was asleep when the concept of federalism was explained. It was the founding fathers’ compromise between a central government that would run everything and the kind of weak central government laid out in the Articles of Confederation that wasn’t working.

Maybe Trump misspoke, or having his authority challenged, he flashed an emotional and arrogant response that he thought justified his viewpoint. In either case, he was clearly wrong. Actually, more than wrong: It betrayed a failure to understand a fundamental principle of our republic, the balance of powers and a divided government.

The federal system was a beautiful solution that has worked well, following a principle that builds a system of government from the ground up, not from the top down. The governors were the ones who shutdown the economy. They now have the heavy responsibility of being instrumental in deciding when to open it.

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www.dennisbyrne.net

My historical novel: Madness: The War of 1812

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