As of late October, the political modelers at FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 72% chance of pulling off the trifecta — winning the White House and majorities in both Houses of Congress — on November 3.

My visceral response to that possibility is negative. Excluding outlier possibilities like a Libertarian landslide, I’ve always considered divided government the best outcome.

Gridlock, in theory, is good. If an opposition party controls either the White House or one house of Congress, that theory goes, it can thwart the other party’s worst ideas through presidential veto or the opposition-controlled house refusing to pass legislation.

But in the 21st century, that theory hasn’t proven out very well. Instead of one party resisting the other party’s worst ideas, it tends to trade its acquiescence to those ideas for getting some of its own worst ideas implemented as well.

Additionally, the runaway growth of presidential power means presidents usually get away with just ignoring Congress when it won’t give them whatever they demand.

Except for a few months around election dates, when gridlock re-emerges as a stalling tactic, divided government delivers the worst of both worlds.

There’s one good thing to be said for single-party government: The ruling party owns the outcomes of its policies.

George W. Bush and the Republicans owned the first six years of the “War on Terror.” They controlled the White House. They controlled the US House of Representatives. They controlled the US Senate.

Barack Obama and the Democrats owned the Affordable Care Act. It was passed by a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate and signed by a Democratic president.

Donald Trump and the Republicans owned everything between January 20, 2017 (when Trump was inaugurated) and January 3, 2019 (when a Democrat-controlled House opened session).

With divided government, both sides have plausible excuses for failing to make our lives better. The ruling party blames opposition obstructionism. The opposition party blames the ruling party’s unwillingness to compromise.

Both excuses are true,  but both excuses also spread a concealing fog over the truth that neither party offers real solutions, and the fact that neither party cares about anything but preserving and expanding its own power.

When one party controls government, it has no one else to blame when its policies fail. What you see is what you get, and what you get is one party having everything its way. That clarity may be the only consolation prize we get out of this election.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When the New York Post began rolling out a series of stories on Hunter Biden’s supposed laptop and its supposed contents, I immediately thought of Stormy Daniels and the “hush money” incident.

“Everyone who cared about Donald Trump’s marital infidelities and sexual peccadilloes,” I wrote at the time, “already had enough — more than enough — information on the subject to reach the same conclusion that they would have reached from this particular incident. And it was therefore clear that nobody who still intended to vote for him as of late October 2016 DID care.”

Everyone — at least everyone who might care one way or another — knew by then that Donald Trump was a lying philanderer with a creepy, proprietary attitude toward women. The existence of one more extra-marital affair, one more non-disclosure agreement, one more cover-up, didn’t change any minds.

Ditto the Post‘s “blockbuster revelations” about Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Joe Biden.

Everyone who might care one way or another knew years ago that Biden the younger got a sweetheart job with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, because Biden the elder was vice-president of the United States. That was obvious — Hunter Biden had no particular qualifications for the job. His relationship with Joe Biden was the only plausible reason.

Everyone who might care one way or another also knew years ago the Joe Biden used his position as vice-president to intervene in Ukraine’s internal affairs, pressuring Kiev to fire a prosecutor  who had investigated Burisma, because Biden bragged about doing so on camera.

Everyone who might care one way or another about Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling or Joe Biden’s tolerance of (at least) or participation in (possibly) that influence-peddling knew about it long before early voting in the 2020 election began.

I could count the number of truly undecided voters left out there on the fingers of one thumb. Anyone who claims to be “undecided” at this late date is leaning hard toward the challenger, not the incumbent. Donald Trump has had four years to favorably impress them. If he hasn’t done so yet, he’s not going to do so in the next two weeks.

That’s why the whole thing is an October Fizzle rather than the October Surprise Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani had hoped it would be. “A difference which makes no difference,” wrote William James, “is no difference at all.” Supposed new evidence, supposedly proving what everyone who cared one way or the other already knew, is no difference at all.

If there’s a real news angle to this whole affair, that angle is in attempts by Facebook and Twitter to keep the Post‘s non-news from “going viral.” The Streisand Effect quickly foiled those efforts. Everyone who might care one way or another about the story quickly learned about it. And learned (if they didn’t already know) not to trust Facebook or Twitter.

If you haven’t voted yet, choose wisely between Libertarian Jo Jorgensen on one hand, or one of two creepy, handsy, senile, corrupt septuagenarians on the other.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On October 20, the US Department of Justice — joined by 11 Republican state attorneys general — filed a civil lawsuit against Google, with the stated goal of stopping it from  “unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets.”

The lawsuit is meritless on its face. Google is no monopoly. Nor could it plausibly become a monopoly without the full support of the global governments (the US is far from the first) who keep saying otherwise.

A “monopoly” is defined as “[t]he exclusive power, right, or privilege of dealing in some article, or of trading in some market,” (Webster’s 1913 edition) or “a market in which there are many buyers but only one seller” (Wordnet).

Google faces powerful and well-financed competitors in every market niche it serves. Some of the major ones:

Microsoft competes with Google in search (Bing vs. Google), email (Outlook vs. Gmail), search advertising (Microsoft Advertising vs. AdSense/AdWords), cloud applications (Office vs. Docs/Sheets/etc.), and computer operating systems (Windows vs. ChromeOS).

Apple competes with Google in desktop operating systems (OSX vs. ChromeOS) and phone operating systems (iOS vs. Android).

Facebook and Twitter, among many others, compete with Google in advertising.

Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu, among many others, compete with Google in digital media.

Yes, Google does pretty well in those ongoing competitions, but there’s nothing wrong with that, nor any guarantee that it will always be so. The landscape is littered with the corpses of former supposed “monopolies” killed off by market competition, technological innovation, and changing consumer preferences, not by government action.

The supposed point of antitrust legislation is to preserve competition and consumer choice, not to slap down winners  and prop up losers.

I say “supposed point,” because the real purpose of antitrust legislation is, you guessed it, to slap down winners and prop up losers, at the expense of competition and consumer choice, and for the benefit of whichever political party needs a punching bag this week to put a shine on its peeling populist paint job.

If the US government is really interested in eliminating monopolies, it might start with the US Copyright Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office before moving on to Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice itself.

All those entities are ACTUAL monopolies, with which competition is legally banned, and which consumers are required by law to patronize and finance.

Google, not so much.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY