Friday, September 25, 2020

Governors, Politics and Our 50 Disunited States

Times are strange. In any number of ways 2020 has been different than any year in recent -- or distant -- memory. Besides the pandemic and the ongoing protests, riots and violence in many cities, has there ever been a time where the role of governors has been so pronounced, so in the news?

I don't think I can remember ever seeing governors in the news this much unless they were positioning themselves for a presidential run. (e.g, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Chris Christie)

Presidents have been making edicts forever. FDR's Executive Order 9066 to send Japanese Americans to internment camps is one early example. But in our 2020 this kind of edict-making power has filtered down to lower and lower levels of government. Governors are making decisions about who can and can't meet, and how many can assemble or be denied assembly. Governors are making decisions to interfere or not interfere with protesters, and to what degree. 

This power by edict has extended still further into cities making decisions about defunding police and whether plastic bags or plastic straws should be made illegal. 

In light of all this the story about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis caught my attention. This past Monday Gov. DeSantis vowed to defund cities that defund police

Does this mean that governors who favor defunding can make edicts to defund cities that don't defund police?

How far does this edict making go? California's governor made an edict this week saying no more gas-powered cars can be sold in California after 2035. It will be interesting to see if the infrastructure can be developed so that electric cars can be re-powered as easily as our current gas station convenience store transportation model. If the rest of the country doesn't follow suit, and gas stations close due to lack of business in 2050, will this have an effect on tourism by car if there's nowhere to refuel? How will the energy be generated to create all the extra electricity? The idealism is noteworthy. The other 49 states will learn from this experiment. 

30 years ago California decided to protect its citizens from harmful chemicals in products by requiring the top five ingredients be identified on the bottle. This transparency would protect their citizens. For many, companies, if not most, their formulas were proprietary. To address this, California created additional bureaucracy to enable companies to register their top 5 products and get codes to place on the bottle that concealed this information.

I was an in-house ad agency for a company in the screen printing industry and we had to acquire these codes and place them on the label. Not to be outdone, New Jersey followed suit. Now I had to make room for two blocks of non-identifying numbers. Shortly after, Pennsylvania made the same edict. In the interest of the people, of course. If this were to continue, there would be no room for the name of the product on the bottle because one of our products came in a bottle not much larger than 100 tablets of aspirin. What's silly is that the people still didn't know what chemicals were in the bottle.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and even though Pennsylvania passed this consumer-right-to-know law, they soon notified companies selling products in that state that they would not enforce it.

Relief.

Life is complicated. Let's not make it moreso. 

Related Links
The 12 Boldest Executive Orders In History
Gov Murphy Usurps Legislative Powers with Latest Edict
Executive Powers in Times of Crisis

Photo by Massimo Virgilio on Unsplash

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