Despite my fine physique and suave and debonair personality I still can't afford a Jaguar E-type, and Mila Kunis won't return my phone calls.
This cannot stand! I am calling on a threatened nation to shower me with cash (and the number to Mila's private line..!) in order to preserve peace, tranquility, and the Natural Order of Things.
Ridiculous, you say?
How much more ridiculous than Orange Foolius' announcement to abrogate Congress' mandated power-of-the-purse to get funding for his Big Beautiful Wall?
I mean...first, let's all remember that this entire southern border farrago is a ginned-up piece of nonsense. Period. There's nothing going on along the U.S.-Mexico border that qualifies as a concern, much less a crisis, WAY much less an "emergency". There IS no "emergency", or, at least, nothing more compelling than my bank account and sex life.
There's no there there.
And yet..."conservatives" will sit on their hands while this great tangerine-hued fool kicks down one more wall between a republic and an autocracy. Because the GOP "base" has been primed by President Coulter and President Limbaugh that they will all be killed and then raped by hordes of brown gangsters if the Wall is not Built. To hell with oligarchy, shrinking wage bases, foolish foreign wars, climate change...MS-13 may be climbing in the bathroom window as we speak!
Emergency!
Here's the thing. A lot of people - and especially a lot of the media people - are going to make this all about Trump. He's a huge orange whiny titty-baby who's having a tantrum that the mean old Dhimmicrats won't GIVE ME MY WALL!!!, so this is going to be portrayed as his toddler-snatches-the-toy solution.
But it's not.
The notion that the situation along the frontera requires spending billions appropriated for other reasons is nonsensical. Border security spending has been thrashed out to a fare-the-well in Congress. Using some gimmick to subvert that process removes a critical "check and balance" between the legislative and executive. It's not explicitly ruled out in the founding documents simply because it's a moronic argument on it's face; people as intelligent as the Founders and Framers would have laughed the notion out of the room.
No. This is an extraordinarily dangerous move, and, because a huge proportion of supposed "conservatives" will do nothing or, worse, applaud it because it is aimed at a target they have been told to hate and fear, represents a not-insignificant chance that it will be folded into the norms of government. The notion that this president or any president can do this is a very un-republican idea.
The notion that a fairly large number of the citizens of a supposedly self-governing republic will accept this?
Even more dangerous, and less republican.
WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF.
(Oh, and Mila? Wear something nice, K?)
Update 2/15 11am: Welp, he did it.
Our friend Pluto is confident that "conservative" Republicans won't follow Hair Furor down the rabbit hole. Let's check in with their Congressional leadership, then, shall we?
"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Trump’s hand was forced on declaring a national emergency by congressional Democrats.The Conscience of Conservatives! Standing athwart the path of history and burbeling "Ummm...durrrr..." Meanwhile, here's our President* singing his explanation why this was necessary:
“President Trump’s decision to announce emergency action is the predictable and understandable consequence of Democrats’ decision to put partisan obstruction ahead of the national interest,” McConnell said in a statement. “I urge my Democratic colleagues to quickly get serious, put partisanship aside, and work with the president and our homeland security experts to provide the funding needed to secure our borders as we begin the next round of appropriations.”
In a tweet, another prominent Senate Republican, Lindsey O. Graham of South Carolina, said he backed Trump’s action.
“I stand firmly behind President Trump’s decision to use executive powers to build the wall-barriers we desperately need,” wrote Graham, chairman of the chamber’s Judiciary Committee."
Hmmm. I wonder if the furnace is lit today..?
Update 2/15 12pm: Of course, if you don't want your republic to become an autocracy, it helps to ensure that the wanna-be-autocratic moron you elected president* is...well, a moron:
FDC, I agree with most of what you've said, but not this: "This is an extraordinarily dangerous move, and, because a huge proportion of supposed "conservatives" will do nothing or, worse, applaud it because it is aimed at a target they have been told to hate and fear, represents a not-insignificant chance that it will be folded into the norms of government."
ReplyDeleteThe reason I disagree is two-fold:
1. the old hard-core conservative Republicans have finally figured out that Trump is a huge problem for them, NOT the FUTURE. They took a look at Trump's remaining supporters and realized that he was bringing trailer trash into their nice clean RICH party, and as one of them told me yesterday, (slightly paraphrased) "we can't have THOSE people thinking that they are important to the Republican party. They'd trash it in nothing flat just for the fun of it."
While I don't fully agree with the woman, she's got a point about the trashing the Republican party, the wealthy and the poor but numerous and disgruntled do NOT have a lot in common besides Trump.
2. Obama showed them how a REALLY SMART smooth-talking Democrat can use their weapons against them in the 2008 Financial Crisis (darned good thing he figured out how to do that too, otherwise the Great Depression would be known as the Not Quite Great Depression and we'd all probably be in a really bad spot right now).
3. Which the Republicans don't seem to have noticed yet but they are going to cringe when they do: Obama pushed the Federal Government Deficit up to 11 Trillion over 8 years which included 2-3 years of near Depression level economics. They were really upset about that.
What are they going to do when they realize that Trump has pushed the Federal Government Deficit up to 22 Trillion (added $4 trillion more than Obama) in 2 years during a time of prosperity. Trump is literally the worse President we've had since the egotistical weak-kneed idiots of the turn of the 20th Century. But back in those days nobody was dumb enough to any power in their hands greater than controlling how frequently the White House lawn was mowed. Yes, the Republicans are covering for Trump right now, but there will come a time when they plant a dagger in his heart and yell, "NEXT!"
P.S. - I love the Coloring Book but then I was a big fan of the show in its heyday, but I was about ten years old then and had about the same level of maturity as the show.
I'd love to believe all this, but I'm looking around for the "conservative Republicans" who are going to give Hair Furor his conge' over this. McConnell? He may be the poster child for "conservative Republican". Where's he at? Oh, right...encouraging the damn fool to do this.
DeleteThe GOP "leadership" knows perfectly well that their plutocratic economic agenda plays well with...well, nobody. The only hope they have of ever winning another election is to continue to keep the Christopaths and xenophobes and racists and gun nuts and all the other MAGAt spawn inside the tent. If they even look sideways at Trump they're toast and they know it. Trump is now the GOP and the GOP is Trump. There's no way they can knock him back now.
That folds into 2); the smarter GOP operative know perfectly well that this is a dangerously stupid thing for them to allow. The next Democratic president will then declare a "national health care emergency" and institute single-payer. Or a "climate change emergency" and institute the Green New Deal.
But they're stuck with it. If they try and put the blocks to the Tangerine Toddler they'll be mobbed by their own C.H.U.D.s., who haven't the slightest notion of this as a Bad Idea. Like the mental four-year-olds they and their Leader are, they just want what they want and they want it NOW!
And 3)? Heh. As Dick Cheney said back in the day; "Deficits don't matter." Not when you're a Republican. When a Democrat runs them? OMFG, La Republique en danger! Nope. The point here was to shove wealth upwards. The Trump Tax Cuts And Oligarchy Act is doing just that. It's a feature, not a bug.
So...nope. I'll bet you all the money in your pocket against all the money in mine; the Congressional GOP will do nothing when this happens. The Dems will take it to court, where if the Republic is lucky the SCOTUS will rule against it on the same grounds that it ruled against Truman in Youngstown Sheet and Tube in 1952. To quote Justice Jackson then:
"In view of the ease, expedition and safety with which Congress can grant and has granted large emergency powers, certainly ample to embrace this crisis, I am quite unimpressed with the argument that we should affirm possession of them without statute. Such power either has no beginning or it has no end. If it exists, it need submit to no legal restraint. I am not alarmed that it would plunge us straightway into dictatorship, but it is at least a step in that wrong direction."
But a court with the current five Republican justices? I have no confidence that they would consider Youngstown Sheet and Tube to be settled law.
I'm going with FDC on this point. I view the Trump presidency as a rewrite or proper sequel to the Republican primary debate show before the 2016 election. Trump literally took a wrecking ball to the whole affair and the apparent annointed one, Jeb Bush, was tossed aside in the polling and reduced to begging for applause at a campaign appearance.
DeleteWith some exceptions, our Noble Republican representatives are either frightened or biding their time.
This is a replay of my thoughts after hearing McConnell on the floor of the Senate commenting recently.
b
That "trash" is what Stalin would call, "useful idiot's."
DeleteAnd if there is one thing I've come to learn about the Republican party, 33% of their base are useful idiots.
They're not getting rid of their "trash," ever.
Oh, they'll put them back in their place, and the "trash" will meekly return to their positions, but get of rid of them?
Oh no, they're way to useful for the Republican sound machine to ever heave overboard.
I expected him to try become Mussolini II when he got elected, but he seems to be too incompetent, too unlikeable to the inner circle and too lazy to do it.
ReplyDeleteIt'll be damning to the American people if he still succeeds at ruining the republic - regardless of whether we consider him to be a symptom or not.
I’d argue that the behavior of his MAGAts and the Congressional GOP is already damning. It shouldn’t matter why this is; if President Sanders did this for a national health system I’d be furious. There is simply no justification for accepting this as in any way consonant with rule of law or popular sovereignty. This is Strongmanism pure and simple; I want it, so I’m doing it. And a third or more of the public WANT that.
ReplyDeleteWe’re well and truly fucked.
Meanwhile Moron-Don says the $6.1 billion in DoD money going to border wall wasn’t for anything that seemed "too important to me".
ReplyDeleteI am hearing that $3.6 billion of that is from military construction projects. In other words hospitals, barracks, base housing, maintenance facilities, intel centers, training depots, etc. Another $2.5 billion comes from counter-narcotics funds.
The major 'national emergency' we have in this country is that we put this bozo in the white house.
Yeah, because fiscal appropriations are just like throwing up a condo in Newark; there's always a slush fund to pay off sleazy contractors and grease the palms of corrupt inspectors. Is there any wonder this jamoke thought he could just grab cash out of the wallet of someone who works for him..?
DeleteFYI, the relevant precedent in Youngstown is Clark's concurrence, in which he specifies that Truman had several statutory remedies available to him to nationalize the steel plant involved but, like Donnie Numbnuts, he "didn't want to wait". So the issue wasn't that the executive had no emergency powers unless specifically enumerated by Congress (Jackson and Blackmun went there...) but that IF the Congress had provided a method (or, by inference, denied that specific method) and the executive didn't abide by it? Then there was no legal "emergency".
ReplyDeleteAnother meanwhile:
ReplyDeleteFederal officials that are supposed to help to safeguard against Pootie's interference in US elections are being cut back severely. So get ready for another round of dezinformatsiya in the social media, which will be amplified in the rest of the media. And Pootie will not be the only one. His 2016 successes got international attention. Expect other foreign states, hostile or not, to use this tool. Not only for elections but also to herd policy in a direction of their liking.
And yet Christopher Krebs, director of DHS's 'Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency', told Congress that election security remains a priority. What a crock. And Krebs? The guy has no education in computer tech, information services, cyber, or security. His degrees are in law and environmental science. He did work for Microsoft as a spokesman to the feds for matters relating to the security issues of Windows OS on government computers. Windows OS has always been the least secure of any OS that I know of. Many security vulnerabilities in Windows are inherent and cannot be patched. Sounds like Krebs was a propagandist instead of a spokesman. He still appears to be.
IMHO Moron-Don is using this whole border-wall-national-emergency thing as a distraction. Keep the media's nose out of all the rest of his dirty dealings and attempts to turn the US into a third world country.
The other irritating part of this is that We the People have things we should desperately debate; unchecked money in our politics, voting security, infrastructure problems, oligarchy, climate...and yet, here we are, spun up over this ridiculous idiotic nothingburger.
ReplyDelete