In a statement, the White House said Biden will use the Defense Production Act to improve the domestic manufacturing of medicines deemed crucial for national security and will convene the first meeting of the president’s supply chain resilience council to announce other measures tied to the production and shipment of goods.
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The Defense Production Act of 1950, which was passed to streamline production during the Korean war, was last used in early 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic to accelerate and expand the availability of ventilators and personal protective equipment.
I appreciate the idea of trying to lower medical costs (I can’t imagine he can use this sufficiently to actually reduce overall inflation) but I can’t help but think that in a working democracy we would repeal the Defense Production Act and the Insurrection Act and any other decade/century old laws that give the executive power which is or might be being repurposed for modern times for political reasons.
If you want to reduce medical costs, pass a law to do that. If you can’t, run on a campaign where you explain that the other side is stopping you from passing the law, and if you don’t win enough seats to pass the law then you just can’t do the thing you wanted to do, Democracy has spoken.
Except we’re not operating under democratic rule. Our democracy is under assault from a conservative minority that is determined to block any attempt to utilize government for the public good. How many comments have been lambasting Democrats for failing to do enough, no matter what they tried? Are you proposing we just give up and abandon democracy because we shouldn’t do everything in our power to counter the unprecedented methods Republicans are using to shut us down? Are you arguing for accelerationism?
It’s people buying into the propaganda that somehow repubs opposing everything somehow is the same as being better than the party trying to do something. Regressives are appealing to idiots because they are loud and have vague answers to hard problems. Shout them down and they might go away. Don’t bother reasoning with them.
It’s not exactly unprecedented. Republicans have been blocking everything for almost 30 years.
I agree with this, this complaint is baked into my comment. Ideally we wouldn’t be running a government by re-interpreting laws from the past. We are and that’s a shame.
Oh I’m the opposite of an accelerationist, I think the solution to the Trump problem is just defeating him at the ballot box, the solution to the voter base that likes him is probably just that we have to compromise with them and do weird interpreting like Biden is doing as necessary. Because their votes count equally, they are allowed to vote this way even if I don’t like it.
It’s just a shame we can’t regularly write good legislation and get it passed to fix specific current problems, and delete the legislation that a majority of folks don’t like. The inertia that leaves the Comstock Act and Insurrection Act on the books 100+ years later to wreak havoc in unpredictable ways is weird and bad.