January 8, 2019
Yesterday, Trump cowed the compliant television networks into ceding 8 minutes in prime time to broadcast his lies to the American public from the Oval Office. Trump tweeted that he would address the “humanitarian and national security crisis” at the southern border. Although there is zero national security threat, there is no question that Trump will use the platform willingly given to him by the television networks to shamelessly fearmonger. We know this because his minions, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and distaff Goebbels, Kirstjen Nielsen, have been making the rounds echoing these lies. Sanders’ lies were so egregious that she was fact checked in real time by Chris Wallace (no doubt haunted by the ghost of his father, the estimable Mike Wallace) who said that only six suspected terrorists had been apprehended at the border, not 4000. In fact, the most common way that foreign terrorists enter the country is via our airports, a problem actually being exacerbated by the Trump created government shutdown.
We all know that Trump’s address tonight has nothing to do with any actual threat, but rather with his desire to create a pretext for declaring a national emergency and commanding the army to start building the wall. The hubristic lawlessness of such a move is so breathtaking that legal experts ranging from Yale law professor, Bruce Ackerman, to hyper-partisan Andrew Napolitano have said so. In an Op-Ed in The New York Times, Bruce Ackerman painstakingly explained that federal law prohibits the “president’s use of the military to enforce domestic law,” and that anyone who “willfully uses any part of the Army or Air Force as a posse comitatus or to execute the laws shall be fined… or imprisoned, not more than two years, or both,” (Source: 18 U.S.C. Section 1385, as cited in “No, Trump Cannot Declare An ‘Emergency’ to Build His Wall,” by Bruce Ackerman, The New York Times, 1/5/19).
Any such action by Trump can readily be challenged in court, but that is cold comfort given a Supreme Court stacked with hard right conservatives eager to serve as a rubber stamp for Trump. We know that any reallocation of the Pentagon budget would require Congressional action and would be blocked by the new Democratic House majority (Source: “No, Donald Trump can’t just use Pentagon money for his border wall,” by Tara Golshan, Vox.com, 3/30/18). Yet we also know that the supine Republican majority in the Senate would sit on its hands and let him do it.
This deepening crisis is being made worse on a daily basis, thanks to the traitorous viper in charge of the Senate and a craven media that knuckles under at the slightest provocation. McConnell refuses to bring legislation to the floor identical to what the Senate passed 100 to 0, prior to the shutdown. Meanwhile, the networks remain all too willing to provide a megaphone for Trump’s lies, while simultaneously hectoring progressive women of color in Congress like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.
The stark reality is that we are heading off of a cliff led by a narcissistic buffoon with the emotional stability and intellect of a truculent toddler and the world view of a KKK Grand Wizard. We have a state of emergency all right, but it isn’t at the southern border. It’s at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
#IMPEACHTHEMOTHERF___ER