Derek Thompson

We want zoning laws to be better.

We want permitting laws to be better.

We want energy construction project laws to be better.

I don't want a future that's just dueling parties, claiming emergency powers to do whatever the executive branch wants until the end of time.

That doesn't seem like a particularly healthy path for democracy.

That said, Donald Trump is definitely pushing on a really interesting point, which is that I think that

Liberals, the Democratic Party in the last 50 years in particular, and this is a thesis that's latent or sometimes even made explicit in abundance, have been too consumed with process, have been too obsessed with let's make sure that we create processes that listen to every possible group before moving forward with the outcome rather than focusing on outcomes in the first place.

That's absolutely a theme of abundance, this liberal almost fetishization of process.

Donald Trump does not fetishize process.

That's for damn sure.

And so there's a way in which he's almost like the Wario of the opposite of –

And he points to the ways in which you can go too far on both dimensions.

You can be a party that is too obsessed with procedure, and you can be a party that is so uninterested in procedure and so taken with the ability of the executive branch or whatever ruling party is in power to just run roughshod over the law by claiming emergency powers forever.

Those are two different extremes.

I want to land somewhere in the middle.

There are examples from the book of...

Democratic leaders declaring sort of an emergency and using that emergency to do what I think is objective good.

So the classic example from our book is when the I-95 bridge fell down in Pennsylvania.

Josh Shapiro declares an emergency.

He sweeps away a bunch of permitting and NEPA rules in order to build the bridge back as fast as possible.