We begin today’s roundup with a scathing editorial from USA Today on the Republicans who supported President Trump’s emergency declaration:
Hypocrisy is a term often bandied about too easily. But it was crystallized in a single moment Thursday, when 41 Republican senators voted to surrender their legislative authority to an overreaching president.
The issue was the power of the purse as spelled out in Article I of the Constitution, which decrees that the people's representatives, not the president, decide how tax dollars are spent.
But in Thursday's vote, the feckless 41 supported President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration aimed at redirecting billions of tax dollars to fund his border wall. Congress had specifically refused to provide this money, so Trump simply took it upon himself to fund it without Congress.
Seung Min Kim & Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post add:
President Trump tried to marshal his most potent weapon — himself — to stave off what eventually became an embarrassing rejection from his own party over his declared national emergency on the border.
In numerous calls with Republican senators in recent days, the president spoke of the battle almost exclusively in personal terms — telling them they would be voting against him while brushing aside constitutional concerns over his attempt to reroute billions of federal dollars for a border wall. He argued that a vote against the emergency would be seen by GOP supporters as being against border security and the wall and would hurt their own political fortunes, according to a person with direct knowledge of some of the calls. [...]
But it wasn’t enough, as a dozen Republicans joined Democrats in dealing Trump a humiliating blow by voting Thursday to nullify the national emergency, setting up what is likely to be the first veto of his presidency.
Laurence Tribe writes in USA Today that the courts should also step in if Trump follows through with his veto and Congress can’t overturn it:
There is one consolation for those injured by Trump’s attempt to seize the power of the purse from Congress: America still has an independent judiciary to quickly intercede. We can still hope that judges across the ideological spectrum, including some appointed by this president, will see this power grab for what it is — a direct assault on our constitutional system of checks and balances, the rule of law and the democratic guard rails that protect us from collapsing into dictatorship.
Here’s Elenor Clift’s analysis of a weakened Mitch McConnell:
A dozen Republicans voted with the Democrats to support a resolution rebuking President Trump for declaring a national emergency in order to secure money to build a wall on the southwestern border. This is a major insurrection within the GOP, and what did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell do?
He stood aside and let Vice President Pence do the heavy lifting of trying to keep the GOP in line. McConnell isn’t popular at the best of times and, at what is shaping up as the worst of times for Republicans, the turtle is showing, once again, that he has the spine of a jellyfish.
At The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser talks to George Conway about the Trump administration:
“If it were not for the inherent checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution,” Conway said, “we would have a banana republic. But that also makes him an inherently weak President, because the office requires you to have the power to persuade. Ultimately, you become a powerful President only if you are able to persuade others to go along with you. His narcissism means he has to retreat to the people who worship him. He cannot reach out and persuade, like every other President tries to do. His narcissism causes him to be a weak President, and the checks and balances mean he is a weak President. And that’s why we don’t have a banana republic.”
On the issue of the Mueller report, it’s no surprise that
Lindsay Graham blocked a Senate effort to make the report public, and did so in a very Trumpian fashion:
Graham, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went a step further, requesting that AG William Barr should appoint a second special counsel to investigate “misconduct” in the Department of Justice over the handling of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the government surveillance of Trump campaign staffer Carter Page. [...]
As the Mueller investigation draws toward its end, deflections like Graham’s will be inevitable. Despite calls for transparency – including an impressive uncontested vote in the House – some Republican leaders will make distracting noises or otherwise try to suppress the report in order to limit Trump’s chance at a one-term presidency. But there is some conciliatory news for people off the hill who want to read the Mueller report: the bulk of its details may already be public. The immense reporting project of the past two years may contain much of the Mueller investigation’s final details, just without the affirmation that the special counsel’s office also finds the misadventures of Trump’s son and son-in-law utterly captivating.
On a final note, TIME has a great piece on today’s massive protest by those who will be affected most by climate change:
Thousands of schoolchildren across the U.S. will be protesting on Friday, uniting with young people around the globe in a goal they believe is critical to their collective future: pressuring world leaders into acting on climate change, particularly to cut carbon emissions over the next decade in order to reduce the extent of global warming.
“March 15 is going to make history,” 13-year-old Alexandria Villasenor, a co-founder of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike, tells TIME. “There has never been a global day of climate action where students around the world are taking action for the same exact cause.”