Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a recent time-traveling escapee from a Thomas Nast cartoon, appeared in the customarily friendly precincts of Fox News on Sunday. Mnuchin was ostensibly there to defend the president*’s dithering last week over signing the omnibus spending bill sent to him by the Congress.

For the benefit of readers who may have been vacationing in rationality, we remind you that the president* took to the electric Twitter machine and threatened to veto the legislation because of something he saw on Three Dolts on a Divan, his favorite morning television program. This made everybody nervous for about 20 minutes, until they all realized that the president* has the attention span of a flea.

He then signed the bill, because he will do whatever the last person to whom he spoke told him to do. His several fans went bananas, so he fell into Twitterrage again, swearing he’d never sign such an abomination again and asking Congress to “send” him a line-item veto to use next time.

As was pointed out almost immediately, this was precisely the same as having the president* asking Congress to “send” him a poll-tax bill. The line-item veto was declared to be unconstitutional 20 years ago this spring, in the case of Clinton v. City of New York. (The “Clinton” in question was President Bill, not Governor DeWitt, and, boy howdy, did President Bill ever attach himself to some bad ideas.) So, when Mnuchin sat down next to Chris Wallace on Sunday, he did so in what should have been the full knowledge that his boss had drifted off to Fantasy Island again.

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Alas, ’twas not to be. The following colloquy ensued:

Wallace: That’s going to happen next time…When the next spending bill comes up in October, they’re going to be demanding parity as well. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but it is reality.

Mnuchin: It doesn’t need to be reality. I think they should give the president a line-item veto.

Wallace: That was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Mnuchin: Well again, Congress could pass a rule, okay, that allows them to do it.

He doesn’t know. Worse, he doesn’t care. Worst of all, he’s sitting in the position he’s in right now because he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. About the country. About its Constitution. About anything that is outside the safety-deposit box he has for a soul.

“It doesn’t need to be reality.”

In Steve Mnuchin’s world, it never has to be.



Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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