RUTHFULLY YOURS

Should Donald Trump be elected this fall, he should waste no time in reversing Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. He not only overstepped his authority, he set the country directly on a course that will bring nothing but trouble.

Acting like the authoritarian that the Democrats and media claim that Donald Trump is, Biden, with a pen and maybe a phone, has ordered through his Environmental Protection Agency to issue a rule that will require Americans to replace their internal-combustion engine automobiles with battery-powered cars. The rule doesn’t require Americans to buy electric vehicles, nor does it directly outlaw the sale of automobiles that run on gasoline.

But in effect, it is a mandate and a ban.

Forcing the country into EVs is an egregious abuse of power by executive edict. Biden’s rule has been referred to, for good reason, as “a “crackdown on cars,” a “bloodbath” for consumers and an example of chutzpah. American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers wisely suggests that “the American people need to rise up against this rule and reject it.”

Yes, he has a financial interest in making that statement. But he knows, as do many, that the booted regulatory regime we’re living under “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans,” as Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University law professor, wrote in his 2014 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”

While “administrative law has avoided much rancor because its burdens have been felt mostly by corporations,” says Hamburger, the beast is no longer being contained.

“Increasingly,” Hamburger says, “administrative law has extended its reach to individuals. The entire society therefore now has opportunities to feel its hard edge.”

In terms of practicality, well, to borrow and modify an aphorism from Swedish socialist economist Assar Linbeck, Biden couldn’t make more of a mess if he bombed his own country (which he has implied is not an impossibility).

Adding tens of millions of EVs to the roads will strain the grid right up to and beyond its capacity, as charging competes with “electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories” for power. (But that’s fine because the government can then institute rationing – a dream come true for the political left.) At the same time, Americans’ wallets will grow flatter as they have to pay higher electricity rates, scrimp to pay EVs’ luxury-item sticker prices, cover their costly repairs, and keep up with steep insurance premiums.

The EV mandate will also devastate the domestic automobile industry – yes, it would be a bloodbath, or a death spiral – and decrease mobility in an ostensibly free society

If Trump, who’s said that on day one of a second term he would close the border, and “drill, drill, drill,” were to cut the Biden rule, it would probably require the White House to issue a new rule that overturns it. It’s a task the feisty Trump would probably enjoy.

In any event, Trump needs to act right away, and, in a clear message to the climate cranks and the warming grifters in elected office, make as much noise as possible while doing it.