Pierce: Trump's 'National Emergency' Is a Purely Dictatorial Action
Trump's 'National Emergency' Is a Purely Dictatorial Action
It is an abuse of power. It is an assault on Congress's Article I powers. Mitch McConnell is complicit.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 15, 2019
I am now convinced that there is absolutely no action that the president* could take that Mitch McConnell would not endorse. I don't want to hear about how mad McConnell was that Trump submarined him on the negotiations, the collapse of which led to the government shutdown. On Thursday afternoon, after infuriating Chuck Grassley by interrupting him, McConnell carried the message to the country from the White House that the president* would sign the latest funding bill, thereby certifying a monumental failure of his presidency*....
Between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, most of the Republicans seem to have made a kind of peace with the inevitability of the president*'s behaving like a tinhorn. We should be accustomed to this by now. The president* is going to raid the military. He is going to raid drug interdiction money. He is going to take money appropriated for one purpose and finance his own dark visions. He is lost in his own nightmares, abandoned in his own bigotry. His mind is a writhing ball of snakes. And there is nobody there to stop him. As Starbuck said of Ahab, he is a madman begetting other madmen. His speech was incoherent in thought, contemptuous of intellect, insane with bloodlust, and completely detached from anything that would be recognizable as reality even in Bedlam. Centuries after we ran a mad king off these shores, we now have one of our own.
This is a bill in response to nothing. This is a bill passed in order to address a delusion that the president* has shared with his most fervent supporters. There is no national emergency on the southern border. There isn't going to be a national emergency on the southern border, unless this president* has some other big, beautiful stupid ideas on how to boot brown people out of the country. Everybody voting on this bill knows all of this very well. The entire United States government has been placed in a freight car on the trolley that runs to the Neighborhood of Make Believe....
This is a direct assault by this president* on the Congress's Article I powers. Usually, presidents use these powers to do things like levy sanctions on countries that are slaughtering their own people. What this president* is trying to do is to redirect money already appropriated for a project that Congress already has declined to fund—the last time only a couple of days ago. That is purely a dictatorial action. It is an abuse of power. It cannot be allowed to stand.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26345673/trumps-national-emergency-is-a-purely-dictatorial-action/
= new reply since forum marked as read
glad the gov isn't #trumpShutDown again.
That was really hard for a lot of Peeps.
