RUTHFULLY YOURS

Will the donkey lie down with the elephant?

Two days after the election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren told the AFL-CIO executive council, “I will work with” Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders: “I and other progressives are prepared to work with him.”

The Washington Post: “Pelosi says Democrats are willing to work with Trump.”

That was easy. Someone should tweet the news to the Occupy Trump Tower mobs on Fifth Avenue.

Of course this burst of Trumpian bonhomie comes with the word “if” attached: They’ll work with Donald Trump . . . if he becomes one of them. Which is to say, if he adopts the progressive policies and attitudes that just got the Democratic Party wiped out, from the presidency down to dogcatcher.

“If Republicans want to force through massive tax cuts,” thundered Sen. Warren, “we will fight them every step of the way.”

Even by the normal standards of postelection schadenfreude, it is hard not to be agog at the spectacle of Democrats trying to figure out what hit them and what to do about it.

A personal favorite is that Democrats must now distance themselves from “wealthy donors.” Party check-writers from Barbra Streisand to Jay Z put it all out there for Hillary, and this is the thanks they get—Bernie Sanders denouncing them to Stephen Colbert as “the liberal elite.”

A conclusion has emerged that the party forgot the forgotten man. In the past week, Trump voters have become the biggest archaeological dig in journalism, with the New York Times last weekend outputting three reports on lost tribes in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan.

President Obama paused during his trip to Greece to admit Mr. Trump won because of voter “anxiety” over the economy. That is the emerging Democratic consensus: The party needs to rediscover the economic well-being of the kind of people who voted Democratic from FDR to Bill Clinton. It is a good question how a party could forget an 80-year constituency.

Nancy Pelosi’s leadership of House Democrats is now under challenge, we are supposed to believe, from members who seethed in silence for years as the party became defined by the Streisandian elites on the East and West Coasts.

Ohio’s Rep. Marcy Kaptur and fellow Ohioan Tim Ryan are both considering an attempt to overthrow the party’s most-famous San Francisco Democrat after Thanksgiving.

Will the progressive websites publish their annual advice column, “How to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving dinner”? Maybe this year they should just listen.CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama spent his final six years in office—and especially the last two—governing largely by executive fiat. He issued executive orders, and his administrative state issued tens of thousands of pages of new regulations that took on the force of law. He called it rule by pen and phone.

This infuriated millions of Americans and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, and one irony is that this also means that Mr. Obama’s policy legacy is less durable. Mr. Trump will now have the chance to reverse these orders and regulations often without new legislation. Here are three ways he and Republicans can proceed:

New executive orders. Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute counts more than 250 executive orders signed by President Obama, plus more than 230 “executive memoranda.” These did everything from creating a new investment vehicle called MyRA, which seeks to encourage new savers to invest in government debt, to directing federal agencies to demand new data to investigate pay disparity by race and sex at government contractors. The Trump transition should review every one so the boss can rescind them if he wishes.

A related category are orders issued by federal agencies without a formal federal rule-making. Mr. Obama’s regulators made an unprecedented practice of issuing “guidance” that allowed agencies to duck rule-making while still forcing targets to comply—or risk enforcement action.

A classic of this genre is the Education Department’s rewrite of Title IX telling universities how they must handle accusations of sexual assault. Other examples run from auto lending to drug discovery to housing rentals. The President’s order legalizing four million illegal immigrants that is currently tied up in court can also be dropped at the stroke of a pen.

Mr. Trump can instruct his new cabinet secretaries to immediately void all such Obama guidance or else put it through the lawful rule-making process. He can also order federal agencies to immediately cease work on regulations in process or due to be sent for publication in the Federal Register.

Congressional Review Act. This legacy of the Gingrich era allows Congress to kill the many last-minute regulations now making their way through Mr. Obama’s agencies. For items enacted in the last 60 working days of this Congress—which probably will mean since late May this year—lawmakers can consider them in January without threat of a Senate filibuster.

That’s how Republicans dismissed Bill Clinton’s last-minute ergonomics rule in 2001. GOP lawmakers put four of these resolutions on the President’s desk during this Congress, but he vetoed them.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/16/bill-de-blasio-calls-for-more-disruption-to-protest-donald-trump.html

Liberal New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for more “disruption” to protest the election of Donald Trump.

“We have to recognize that all over this country, the more disruption that’s caused peacefully … the more it will change the trajectory of things,” he said in a radio interview on Monday, adding that Trump did not have a mandate to implement his agenda because he failed to win the popular vote.

De Blasio also pledged that New York City would not comply if Trump sought to restore “stop-and-frisk,” a controversial policy that was deemed unconstitutional by a U.S. district court judge in 2013. “They can threaten to take away money, but they cannot tell us how to police our streets,” he said.

The Democratic mayor, who aspires to be a standard bearer for the left, criticized members of his own party for failing to address the concerns of working-class voters, who “have every right to feel cheated.”