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W Speechwriter Latimer: 'Trump is turning America into a banana republic'
We’ve from heard a lot of handwringing from conversatives who startoff with ‘No one could possibly have imagined ... . This one doesn’t. He’s says ‘I’m a fool’
Trump’s National Emergency Is Great News for Future President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
by Matt Latimer
I hope President Donald Trump and his short-sighted supporters have been enjoying the fun they’ve had at the Green New Deal’s expense. Unfortunately for them, the president’s plan to declare a national emergency, which the White House announced Thursday and which could allow Trump to build his wall without congressional approval, may have just made a Green New Deal inevitable in 2021 - or whenever he’s out of the White House.
By now, we’ve all become numb, alarmingly so, to the nutty ideas the president of the United States has floated or in some cases enacted to undermine the basic norms of our democratic institutions: firing FBI personnel on various pretexts, discounting election results he doesn’t like, befriending vicious dictators, claiming judges are biased based on their ethnicity, alleging massive voter fraud without evidence, ignoring intelligence findings he doesn’t agree with, and on and on and on. But as bizarre and dangerous as these have been, his plan to declare a national emergency is by far the absolute worst.
Shame on any “conservatives” who roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and let him take this path because they are sick of arguing with him. (You know who you are.) This is going to backfire on them in a major way—and the tragedy is that every one of them knows this. The core of conservatism has always been a distrust of a powerful national government and the necessity of imposing restraints on it. That’s out the window now, like nearly every other tenet that held the movement together.
I used to laugh when my more progressive friends warned me that Trump wanted to turn America into a third-world banana republic. He’d never pull that off, I’d tell them. The Constitution will stop him. Members of Congress will stop him. The GOP will stop him. Now, I’m the one who is the fool. I’ve tried very hard to restrain myself from frantic pronouncements, but this national emergency declaration is the closest my friends have ever come to seeing their worst fears realized. Is there any other way to see it?
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/14/trump-national-emergency-border-precedent-225055
By now, we’ve all become numb, alarmingly so, to the nutty ideas the president of the United States has floated or in some cases enacted to undermine the basic norms of our democratic institutions: firing FBI personnel on various pretexts, discounting election results he doesn’t like, befriending vicious dictators, claiming judges are biased based on their ethnicity, alleging massive voter fraud without evidence, ignoring intelligence findings he doesn’t agree with, and on and on and on. But as bizarre and dangerous as these have been, his plan to declare a national emergency is by far the absolute worst.
Shame on any “conservatives” who roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and let him take this path because they are sick of arguing with him. (You know who you are.) This is going to backfire on them in a major way—and the tragedy is that every one of them knows this. The core of conservatism has always been a distrust of a powerful national government and the necessity of imposing restraints on it. That’s out the window now, like nearly every other tenet that held the movement together.
I used to laugh when my more progressive friends warned me that Trump wanted to turn America into a third-world banana republic. He’d never pull that off, I’d tell them. The Constitution will stop him. Members of Congress will stop him. The GOP will stop him. Now, I’m the one who is the fool. I’ve tried very hard to restrain myself from frantic pronouncements, but this national emergency declaration is the closest my friends have ever come to seeing their worst fears realized. Is there any other way to see it?
Two things - 1. They’re scared of the Green New Deal aren’t they? 2. If Convservatatism is about ‘imposing restraints on powerful national government’ then W’s merry band of war-at-any-cost neocons were drooling rabid radicals.
