Paint It Whack

National Review's Kevin Williamson isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I would encourage you to read his recent piece at the magazine's online site about our United States Representatives who have become exercised about the proposed paint scheme of the next Air Force One jets.

As Williamson points out, occasionally the presidential planes are replaced by newer ones. This is good, because otherwise we have the leader of the free world flying around in a C-54 Skymaster and it's not easy to get parts for a 77-year-old aircraft. Plus the cruising speed of 190 mph would make getting to those summits with Kim Jong Un verrrrry long and boring.

So new jets are in the pipeline, scheduled to go into service in late 2024 or early 2025. The White House has suggested a red, white and blue color scheme that certain folks in Congress don't like because they think it will look too much like the current President's own private jets. The House Armed Services Committee voted 31-26 to require any interior or exterior changes to presidential aircraft appearance to have congressional approval.

Williamson notes that a representative from Connecticut actually voiced the concern about the decreased fuel efficiency that may be caused by the weight of the new paint job as opposed to the current one -- the additional color, you see. Now, it may be that the representative from Connecticut overheard someone read something about Congress taking back legislative power it had ceded to the executive branch. I say "overheard" because other options, such as reading, are not credible. It's more likely that he wants to ding the president and lacks the political power or intelligence to come up with another idea, but it may be the other reason. I pledge to vote for Bill DeBlasio in the Democratic primary if any serious person anywhere ever had this situation cross his or her mind in connection with the separation of powers issue. "Mr. President, the executive branch may now be performing almost all of the functions designated to the legislative one, but that doesn't mean you can just paint the American president's plane red, white and blue without our approval!"

The Connecticut representative, by the way, chairs the HASC seapower subcommittee, but if you ask yourself why he's chiming in on an aerial matter you should stop -- that way madness lies.

The problem is not just that things like this little flap are, to use the cliché, "how you get Trump." I'm resigned to the fact that the only person working harder than Democrats to see Trump re-elected is Kellyanne Conway. Every time they open their mouths, Democratic presidential candidates demonstrate that they don't know how to beat Trump, they only know how to beat up on Trump. They are determined to take their second greatest chance to win the White House in modern times and do with it exactly what they did with the first: Nominate an unsuitable candidate who will run a campaign that could not help Donald Trump more than if he designed it himself.

The problem is that actions like this are repeated on small and large scales every frickin' day. For example, should the House Armed Services Committee feel a need to play with airplanes, it might note that the new fighter plane on which our nation has spent just under half a trillion dollars doesn't, er, work. If only there were a legislative committee charged with reviewing matters that dealt with our nation's armed services!

Instead, the tiny, tiny brains of the HASC leadership will concern themselves with what the President's airplane looks like. The Hill's story on this vote has committee members saying that this vote is in no way a ding at the President. We may now posit a Congressional Uncertainty Principle similar to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of physics. Just as a it is impossible to know both the precise location and momentum of a subatomic particle, it is impossible to know if some representatives' lies are more blatant than they are stupid, or vice versa.

Williamson's article is worth reading, as is his conclusion: Get rid of the whole specially-built aircraft entirely. If the Queen of England can fly British Airways, then the President of the United States can fly on a commercial airplane. I would extend his idea, though, and suggest to the voters of a number of states -- especially Connecticut and California -- that they have some other baggage they should unload as well.