I write these columns on Friday mornings. I start well before sunrise and finish a first draft by 8 a.m. at the latest, to allow revision time. This time I started at 3 a.m. The column is due at 9 a.m.
The process goes like this:
To begin, start a new document where the column will be written. Place the phrase “Insert column here:” at the top of the blank document.
Set firmly aside.
Warm up by doing the New York Times daily KenKen puzzles. Go through all my overnight Facebook notifications, writing responses here and there, as moved to do so. Pay special attention to what people are talking about. It’s called “gauging the room.”
Then, check the latest news. Usually there’s nothing much — many politicians prefer to dump news on late Friday evenings in the hopes that you’re all going to be out partying and not notice. By the time you’re back to sober, they’ll have had time to either fix the mess they made or to come up with a half-plausible excuse for it.
But this morning is different. This morning President Trump announced he will declare a national emergency to fund his border wall obsession.
The news in front of me this morning is full of articles about how that decision will lead to mass litigation. Lawsuits will fly like pigs don’t.
Of course they are all right in saying that’s what will happen, because there is no way Trump could convince a court that there is an actual national emergency here.
Nobody is really talking about why this declaration matters. It matters because declaring the emergency allows Trump to divert funding from other important programs.
The will of Congress was made clear by the passage of a compromise bill with some border wall funding. Trump should have signed that legislation and left it at that. Virtually nobody in Congress agrees there’s a border emergency. Instead, Congress set different priorities, and funded them accordingly.
By declaring a national emergency anyway, Trump is depriving Congress of its authority to set priorities by deliberate legislation — its job.
It would be an entirely different matter if Congress hadn’t passed any legislation funding the wall at all. Then he could declare an emergency on grounds of Congressional inaction. But what’s going on here is that Trump is kicking Congress to the dirt. This is a coup.
The best thing that could happen next is for the House to force the Senate to either vote to reject the emergency declaration, or failing to do so, be seen by the whole country as handing its authority over to the president and asking for nothing in return.
If the Senate doesn’t vote to reject the emergency declaration and if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the president when the litigation gets to them, then the time will come to seriously consider what Trump’s coronation as King will look like.
Who should set the very best crown the world has ever seen on Trump’s head? Mitch McConnell? John Roberts? Melania?
Obviously, the coronation should be held in the Senate. On his march to the front of the Senate chamber Trump should walk on the backs of Senators who support him, who will happily lie prone for him as a token of their support of His Majesty.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd.
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