Crossposted from Mock Paper Scissors: Just give him the money, and no one gets hurt!
Well, fellow hostages, by the time I post this, Comrade Stupid will have declared his National Emergency for the emergency that he created at the border, after signing some sort of bill that avoids the other national emergency that he created. And then he goes to Merde-a-Lardo to recover from all that work.
The man works his tiny fingers to the bone.
“The upshot is that any attempt by Trump to get around Congress by using invented emergency powers would violate the Constitution. It almost certainly would be blocked by the courts. And it would constitute a high crime and misdemeanor qualifying him for impeachment.”
Silly Bloomberg! Obeying the law has never been important to Hair Füror.
Reliable Sources email thingie point us to Tiger Beat’s conservative editor, Matt Latimer:
“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…
“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?”
It’s worth the read to see a Republican admit that the Left was right, all along. Read the rest of it.
Once Comrade Stupid pulls the plug, then Speaker Pelosi gets her game on.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday that Democrats will weigh their options for a response, including taking legal action. She was asked about the possibility of scheduling a vote that would put Republicans on record over Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency but declined to confirm if she would do that.
“I don’t believe that there’s any good faith negotiations to have with the Republicans in Congress if they’re going to support the president doing an end-run about what the will of the people, the Congress of the United States, has put forth,” the California Democrat said. “So we will review our options and I’m not prepared to give any preference to any one of them right now.”
“Pelosi said she “may” mount a legal challenge against the declaration but did not not want to commit to anything until seeing Trump’s explanation for his action.”
The vote that would “put Republicans on record” would have to be a joint resolution, which is privileged, and would require amply be-chinned Mitch McConnell to hold a vote within 18 days of passing the house. Joint resolutions take 2/3 majority of each chamber to pass, and would put every Republican on record that they support 1) a power grab by the prznint that effectively makes Congress useless, or B) defy the wishes of the Russian Usurper.
House Democrats (along with citizens who stand to be harmed by Trump’s theft of funds and land) would have standing to sue the administration. Some legal experts think lower courts will block the declaration, the seizures, or both pending an eventual ruling by the Supreme Court.
UPDATE 1:
BREAKING: President Trump says he'll declare national emergency, use executive powers to bypass Congress, obtain more money for border wall.
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 15, 2019
And so it starts.
