OPINION:
Last week was not a particularly good week for folks on the left.
In a transparently and embarrassingly political attempt to stop the bleeding on the issue of illegal immigration, President Biden finally decided to pretend to begin to address the disaster he created at what used to be the southern border of the United States.
For his trouble, he got beaten up and left in the middle of the road by Reps. Nanette Barragan of California and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Sen. Alex Padilla of California, all fellow Democrats. Even his pal Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware belittled the effort.
Everyone else pretty much ignored what was a profoundly trivial and ignorable event.
Meanwhile, back in the place that invented these United States — the commonwealth of Virginia — Gov. Glenn Youngkin figured he was done waiting for the General Assembly and declared Virginia’s independence from California’s ban on gasoline-powered cars. Virginia is the first state to revisit the wisdom of following California down this reckless and unwise path. It won’t be the last.
Mr. Youngkin was clear: “When far-left progressives had total control over our commonwealth, they passed a misguided bill that … would have forced Virginians to buy electric vehicles and punish Virginia auto dealers for selling gas-powered cars. If you want to buy an electric vehicle, that’s your decision. But Virginians must have the freedom to make that decision on their own.”
The most entertaining thing, however, may have happened in New York City, where Buffalo’s finest, Gov. Kathy Hochul, decided, more or less at the last minute, to scrap plans to tax people for the right to drive to and fro in Manhattan. That plan, which goes by the unfortunate moniker of “congestion pricing,” was the product of years of painstaking work by environmentalists and busybodies and was, as one might expect, hated by pretty much everyone.
Except for the prophets of doom. One of them noted with a tone as somber as the grave: “It does not bode well for the city and the planet if we can’t regulate the use of personal vehicles in the densest transit environment in the country.” Take a moment, and both enjoy the schadenfreude and marvel at the audacity of people who want to regulate everything about your life.
Finally, on Wednesday, Thomas Pyle, the chieftain of the American Energy Alliance, wandered into a Politico summit — theoretically about energy but really, like all such summits, about extracting cash from the federal government — and simply pointed out that former President Donald Trump has been pretty clear about his dislike of the Inflation Reduction Act and his desire to get rid of it all.
Mr. Pyle horrified the assembled masses by saying, “If Donald Trump wins the election, he’s going to take a look at the revenue, the potential revenue you can generate from funds in the IRA that haven’t been spent, to fund his priorities.”
That bit of common sense seemed to surprise the crowd and the event sponsors, even though Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly made it clear that spending on wind power and electric cars is going to change in a Trump administration and that he would impose an immediate moratorium on the “spending, grants and giveaways” contained in the Inflation Reduction Act.
I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but if you insist on erasing national borders, telling people what kinds of cars they can buy, where they can drive and when, and asking taxpayers to pay for the privilege of making other people rich through confiscation of their taxes, you should not be surprised when you eventually meet resistance.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”
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