Blocking the U.S. Steel Sale Is a Perfectly Disgraceful End to Biden’s Political Career
The decision to block U.S. Steel’s acquisition by Nippon Steel is the perfect coda to President Joe Biden’s political career.
By intervening in the private business affairs of the two companies, Biden is demonstrating once again his expansive view of executive power, hubristic sense of government’s ability to order economic affairs, and willingness to stretch the definition of “national security” to justify his big government agenda even when there is plainly no national security threat.
Those elements have been central to Biden’s political persona for decades. Even as his charisma and mental facilities have failed, they remain. From his earlier support for the drug war, the USA PATRIOT Act, and Obamacare to his administration’s attempts at broad student loan forgiveness and inflation-inducing Bidenomics, Biden has rarely been deterred by norms or laws that limit federal power or by economic good sense. If there’s something Biden wants to do, he’ll simply find a way to do it.
Blocking Nippon’s planned purchase of U.S. Steel is something Biden clearly wanted to do. He publicly opposed the deal soon after it was announced and indicated several times over the past few months that he was inclined to stop it. The only question was whether he’d be able to find a way to actually do it—and this is Biden, so that was never much of a question at all.
Officially, Biden says he’s blocking the deal because there is “credible evidence” that the deal “threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
The official order signed by Biden laughably fails to detail any of that supposedly credible evidence, however. That’s because it’s ridiculous to suggest that Nippon Steel, a publicly traded company based in a close American ally (Japan) that already operates several steelmaking facilities in the United States, is any sort of threat.
Indeed, even the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a shadowy entity created during the late stages of the Cold War to review potential economic threats to the country that’s metastasized into an all-purpose mechanism for presidents to contro
Article from Reason.com
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