At the end of a week in which Democratic and Republican legislators did exactly what American pundits keep saying that the public wants them to do—sit down at a table and pound out a compromise solution—all of their efforts are about to be made into a pointless sideshow through an action that uses “compromise” in a very different way. As in, Donald Trump is about to compromise the American system of government. Which seems oddly appropriate, since what legislators were attempting to resolve was not an issue of border security in the first place, but a crisis created by Trump. Trump is the problem. And it’s about to get worse.
Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates may have held a few surprises, but Donald Trump’s post-Valentine gift to America is perfectly predictable: He intends to drive the nation straight over a cliff for absolutely no reason other than to salve his own hypersensitive ego. After weeks of overnight efforts to pound out a package in which Democrats genuinely extended themselves to the point where support for the results is far, far, far from universal, that work and those choices are going to be annulled. According to ABC News, Trump is preparing to announce that he won’t take the $1.3 billion worth of funding that legislators agreed to fundamentally waste at the border in order to make him stop hurting America. Or rather, he will take it. Then he’ll simply appropriate $6.7 billion more.
Trump’s not even stopping at the $5.7 billion he demanded all along; he’s going for a jaw-dropping $8 billion, and, best of all, he intends to steal it not just from disaster funds intended to address those most in need, but from the drug interdiction funds that actually stop the threat he’s pretending to care about. That’s right: In order to get money for something that every expert agrees will not halt the flow of drugs into the country, Trump will take $600 million from the Treasury Department drug forfeiture fund, and a whopping $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense’s drug interdiction program. These are programs that genuinely impact the flow of illegal narcotics into America.
If the FBI isn’t already too busy looking at Trump’s other issues, it might be time to open that counterintelligence investigation into whether Trump is actually an agent of foreign drug lords. Though frankly, it’s hard to think of any enemy who would not be thrilled at the lasting damage he’s creating.
As Trump prepares to address the national emergency of Sean Hannity not being sufficiently flattering to him, he’s aided and abetted by his right-right-hand man in taking a chisel to the Constitution, Mitch McConnell. It’s been months since McConnell stopped pretending that the Senate was actually part of an independent branch of government and made it clear that it was just a rubber stamp for Trump. In fact, it’s possible to mark down December 2018—the month in which McConnell openly declared that he would not bring a bill to the floor of the United States Senate without knowing that it had been pre-approved by Trump—as a definitive date for the end of all those things they teach students in American Government class. As it turns out, children, Congress gets one vote, and Donald Trump gets two. So … whatever he says goes. Sorry, I’m-just-a-bill guy, you got it wrong.
(Say, Mitch, how is your wife doing over at the Department of Transportation? Still racking up a record number of private meetings with people whose identities haven’t been revealed? I’m sure that’s not at all a factor in surrendering the Senate to Trump.)
While McConnell’s action in the Senate is being painted as a calculation on his part—Trump wouldn’t sign without McConnell agreeing to support Trump’s ludicrous use of the National Emergency Act to take what he wants anyway, so McConnell is agreeing—there is just about everything wrong with this sick bit of calculus. The Senate is not supposed to go cap in hand to the White House to get permission on what it can pass, and it’s certainly not supposed to agree to surrender its independence in exchange for a signature on paper that it knows will be meaningless from the start.
But then, McConnell isn’t so much surrendering his independence as putting an official stamp on a surrender he already announced. And why not? In order to keep open the pipeline of conservative judges, McConnell has already corrupted every tradition, trampled every rule, and poisoned every relationship in the Senate. He might as well surrender, because there’s nothing left to save. It’s wrong to call McConnell a rubber stamp for Trump. Even rubber stamps have some substance.
Sorry as it might be to watch McConnell shred the last fiction of independence over something of value, that’s not even the case. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency will be immediately met with a challenge from the House—Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Joaquin Castro has already announced that he has the paperwork standing by to terminate it, and it seems all but certain that Trump’s declaration won’t go unchallenged for even a day. Perhaps not an hour.
But the House resolution to terminate Trump’s theft is unlikely to be necessary, because everyone—as in everyone—expects this attempt to misuse the National Emergency Act to land in court as fast as someone—as in anyone—can deliver a note to the desk of any federal judge in the country. Trump’s money and power grab will be frozen the instant it leaves his spittle-flecked lips.
There is no emergency on the border. But there is an emergency. The emergency is Trump’s willingness to seize powers that are supposed to be restricted to things moving too fast for Congress to intervene and use them instead to overrule Congress. Trump’s actions make a mockery of democracy. McConnell’s actions make a laughingstock of the Senate. Together they create a genuine national threat.
And on Friday morning, it seems there is absolutely no guardrail remaining to keep the car from plunging over a cliff.