Democrats and business assure each other that everything will be fine

Nevada always ranks high on surveys of places mining corporations would prefer to invest. It’s not just because Nevada has valuable minerals. It’s also because the regulatory and legal environment is stable relative to many other parts of the world. The threat, for instance, of Marxists overturning property laws and nationalizing the mines, or of an authoritarian strongman seizing mines and transferring ownership to a crony is pretty low in Nevada.

Not just mining but business and industry in general prefer a reliability and stability that is reinforced by  the rule of law.

Meanwhile, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Donald Trump declared over the weekend.

The Republican-controlled Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court are already subservient to Trump. If Trump and his unelected co-president Elon Musk succeed in their drive to overturn the rule of law and establish the rule of arbitrary authoritarianism in its place, neither Congress nor the courts will be able to protect business or anybody else from corrupt and punitive governance.

Also over the weekend, the Washington Post reported Musk’s next escapade will be securing access to “a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country.”

You’d think business would be alarmed by some of this.

Maybe business secretly is.

But when not cowering in fear of Musk and Trump or trying to curry favor with the regime, business and industry leaders are just keeping their heads down — and their mouths shut — and hoping for the best.

And congressional Democrats are tacitly encouraging them to stay that course.

Last week, Nevada Democrats Rep. Steven Horsford and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, with support of co-sponsor Sen. Jacky Rosen, joined with Nevada’s only Republican in Congress, Rep. Mark Amodei, to reintroduce legislation (it didn’t get passed in the last Congress) designed to let the mining industry dump its spoilage and slag pretty much wherever it wants.

Also last week, Cortez Masto and Democratic Rep. Susie Lee held an event that included local industry figures to herald legislation designed to speed up the process of assessing value of federal lands, and hence expedite the sale of federal lands — a high priority of commercial, industrial, and residential developers. 

Neither piece of legislation is what you’d call particularly momentous, and both measures were crafted prior to Trump’s electoral victory last year. 

But in the context of the “shock and awe” and “flood the zone” mayhem that has taken hold over the last month, both measures help explain (along of course with the corporate tax cuts Trump has promised) why business isn’t raising alarms about the Trump-Musk administration’s chaos, unpredictable edicts, intentional lawlessness, and other assaults on stability and reliability that business purportedly prefers.

Bipartisan canoodling with politicians reassures industry. Yes, things certainly are getting weird up in here lately. But if you’re, say, a mining executive or a land developer, you can’t help but notice that Democratic members of Congress are acting as if things will continue in a more or less normal fashion.

And of course bipartisan canoodling with industry probably reassures the politicians. Yes, things certainly are getting weird up in here. But if you’re a Democratic member of Congress, you can’t help but notice that leaders in your most closely allied industries are acting as if things will continue in a more or less normal fashion.

Congressional Democrats not just from Nevada but from all over are crowing about the oodles of bipartisan measures, many of them industry-friendly, that they are so proud to be backing these days. 

However unwittingly, politicians and industries are reassuring each other that there is no need to be overly alarmed, and that everything will be fine. 

And however unwittingly, they are simultaneously signaling to the public that everything will be fine. 

Yes, Nevada Democratic members of Congress have denounced Trump’s actions, to lesser and greater degrees, on occasion. But they’ve also been keeping calm and carrying on with industries in a mutually enabling feedback loop of whistling in the dark, encouraging the public to likewise be sanguine about the threat posed by Musk-Trump in the process.

It seems a reckless pastime. The Musk-Trump project to replace constitutional governance with authoritarian rule will only be thwarted, assuming it can be, if the public is appalled by it.