One returns, with something less than enthusiasm, to the perennial spectacle of American jurisprudence, specifically as it pertains to the various and sundry constitutional skirmishes currently engulfing the capital. Today’s instalment — and one uses the term with a weary sigh — arrives from Albany, New York, where a coalition of states, led with predictable fervour by New York itself, has decided the most pressing matter of public concern is the purported underwhelmingness of the current administration’s attempts to circumvent the highest court.
Yes, reader, you read correctly. These states, in a move that one can only describe as a triumph of the absurd over the merely irritating, are suing on the grounds that the tariffs imposed by the White House represent an “illegal end run” — a phrase that always conjures images of a rather clumsy rugby player, not a constitutional crisis — largely because this particular end run is apparently not spectacular enough. The New York Attorney General, one Ms. Letitia James, was quoted as saying, with a straight face one presumes, that the whole affair was “frankly, disappointing.”
Disappointing, indeed. One imagines her sitting in some oak-panelled office — undoubtedly more opulent than this cubicle Hambry provides, though I’ve seen worse, believe me, far worse, especially during the ‘87 market crash reports — lamenting the sheer lack of dramatic flair. It’s hardly the stuff of high-stakes political theatre, is it? Not a genuine constitutional crisis, merely a B-movie rendition of one. One half expects them to demand a minimum number of dramatic pronouncements and perhaps a few more trumpets before executive power is deemed sufficiently overreached.
Having observed American politics for longer than most of these individuals have been drawing breath — and a great many of them draw it rather loudly, I’ve found — I can assure you that the bar for executive overreach used to be considerably higher. One recalls the rather more robust arguments over presidential prerogative during, say, the early 1970s. Those were crises with genuine teeth, not merely a collection of states complaining that the emperor’s new clothes, while transparently ill-fitting, were not quite transparent enough.
It speaks volumes, does it not, about the current political climate that the gravest accusation one can level against an executive action is its apparent lack of panache? That the grievance lies not merely with the illegality, but with the style of the illegality. It’s a tedious business, really, suggesting a profound lack of imagination on all sides. One longs for a scandal with some genuine intellectual heft, or at least one that doesn’t demand one to parse the aesthetics of constitutional bypasses. I trust Hambry will find this sufficiently 'engaging' – though frankly, I found drafting it rather more of a chore than usual. Next time, perhaps a proper scandal, if it isn’t too much trouble.
