Charles P. Pierce: Trump's 'National Emergency' Is a Purely Dictatorial Action

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26345673/trumps-national-emergency-is-a-purely-dictatorial-action/?fbclid=IwAR1uXPJeXSoClaLXWeUZM2RHURIJgjxy8K-kRXEm8veA68ec8n1y0meM9cQ


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

snip//

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.

It can be argued that this precipitous move by the White House is another bit of legerdemain through which the president* can make the Andrew McCabe revelations vanish from the news cycle. That seems less important than usual now that the Senate has decided to share the president*'s delusions and bring us along for the ride.

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.

The argument being made by some on both the left and the right that, OK, if he can do this, then the next Democratic president can declare a national emergency on gun violence, say, or the climate crisis is sadly beside the point, and Democrats, in particular, should shut up about it. (This means you, Speaker Pelosi.) This is a clear and present danger to the constitutional order. Without the power of the purse, Congress has no power at all.

Mitch McConnell knows this. He even has been warning against this very power grab for a couple of weeks now. But he seems determined to neuter his own institution in order to curry favor with a failed president* and a bunch of idiot pundits from Fox News. He is abandoning his own responsibilities in the hopes that the courts will bail him out. And, again, there is no national emergency to be declared. Not outside of the Oval Office, anyway.

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[regnaD kciN]

2. I think everyone, including Yurtle, is assuming this will die in the courts...

...so that Trump can blame those eeeeeeeeeeevil "Obama judges" (you know, like Justice Roberts, who I don't see going along with this) for blocking The Will Of The People and thus continue with business as usual while avoiding blame from his fervent followers for his own failure.

And I hope they're right.

Because, as Pierce rightly points out, while the understandable response from Democrats is "if this stands, just wait until we get a Democratic president in charge," the fact remains that, should the courts approve this, we will have essentially been transformed from a democratic republic to an elected, time-limited dictatorship. Any president will be able to (and, frankly, be a fool not to) overrule Congress on anything whenever they don't rubber-stamp his or her proposals. And it doesn't matter if that's being done in a conservative or progressive direction. If this flies, we may as well simply dissolve and eliminate Congress, and convert the country to a "elect a king or queen for a four-year term" system.

[ck4829]

3. K&R

[Demovictory9]

4. ..