Phil Murphy (D-Goldman Sachs) is running for New Jersey Governor this year on a relatively simple platform, Save Jerseyans:
- We can meet all of our obligations, and raise all sorts of taxes, without any negative consequences for New Jersey’s economic and fiscal health, and
- Phil is going to “protect” us from Donald Trump.
I’ve addressed both points in recent weeks by posing the obvious question: Who will protect New Jersey from Phil Murphy?
The policies backed by Murphy — including a new “state bank” bureaucracy, minimum wage hikes and tax increases — have been definitively proven NOT to work again and again everywhere they’re tried. It’s not a matter of ideology; it’s a matter of the basic tenants of mathematics. No one (except for him) will be able to live here if he wins.
But the ‘protect us from Trump’ line deserves special attention in light of Phil’s summertime rhetoric.
“Four more years of Chris Christie-style politics won’t make New Jersey the state where we draw the line against Donald Trump. But we will,” Murphy declared on primary election night.
Now, let’s assume for a second that Donald Trump actually IS a threat of some species to the people of New Jersey.
What exactly does Phil Murphy intend to do about it??
What type of opposition does he plan?
Where will this “line” be drawn? And how will he draw it?
Not since the days of the U.S. Civil War have Democrats cared much for state rights or the arcane constitutional theory of nullification. There’s that small matter of the Supremacy Clause; while “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” (h/t 10th Amendment), American states don’t get to decide which otherwise-constitutional federal laws they’d like to honor and those which they would not. The resolution of the 1830s Nullification Crisis put that baby to rest for all time.
The modern Democrat Party is organized around the principle of UNLIMITED federal power. In recent years, they’ve pioneered the government’s intervention in every aspect of American life, most notably by nationalizing the health care industry.
So this Murphy-adopted Trump “resistance” nonsense isn’t ideological. The likely truth: Phil isn’t harboring any specific, substantive plans to do ANYTHING to buck Trump in any meaningful way other than perhaps on the sanctuary city/state front, a likely losing battle in any event given the U.S. Supreme Court’s current composition.
It’s all smoke, folks.
Political pandering to a 2016-traumatized blue state audience.
All the same, you and I know that the Murphy platform might succeed despite all of the forces of fact weighted against Phil Murphy’s declared positions. That’s what happens when we stop teaching civics and economics in U.S. classrooms.
The electorate (nearly 1/4 of which don’t know which country we separated from on July 4, 1776) simply doesn’t know enough to protect itself from political predators like… Phil Murphy.
They can’t do the math.
They don’t KNOW what government is supposed to do, or why it’s even important to have that discussion.
I don’t agree with him on much else, Save Jerseyans, but when Noam Chomsky observed that “[e]ducation is a system of imposed ignorance,” he was probably saying more than he knew.
Phil Murphy could never survive politically in a state where your average Joe or Jane was as well versed in the Federalist Papers and the works of Milton Friedman as The Bachelor and the sports page. Not for a second. But that’s not the world in which New Jersey finds itself drowning in debt, decay, and demagoguery.
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