So I guess we should expect some Amdy McCabe tweets this weekend after he appears on 60 Minutes:


McCabe says he opened investigations into Trump to put Russia probe 'on solid ground' - POLITICO

This weekend? Nah, he was all over that today. Must have been on Fox News during his 6 hour executive time.

Trump signing the budget compromise, but also declaring a national emergency apparently.

Good to see small government conservatives sticking to their principles.

Some Senate R's have warned for weeks that declaring a national emergency:

1. Sets a precedent the next Democratic president could follow in ways they hate.
2. Is likely to get Trump sued.
3. Probably won't get a single additional mile of wall built.

— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) February 14, 2019

Make no mistake: the next Democratic President will declare national emergencies on guns and climate change and cite the Trump precedent when doing so.

— Doug Heye (@DougHeye) February 14, 2019

Pelosi pretty much just said as much in her presser.

Yeah I don't give a crap about a wall other than it wasting more tax dollars. But if this goes through, Democrats can do some stuff if they win the WH. Maybe the easiest way to get Medicare for All.

Politically, this seems to make sense--at least in the short term.

He either gets a wall built. Or, more likely, it is hung up in the courts, and he gets to blame Democrats and liberal judges for not keeping us safe.

I still think it's possible Trump will be too much of a coward to go through with this, but if he does it we'll be in a new world where the President can spend any appropriated money on anything he/she chooses. In a very real way, that would be the end of the legislative branch.

Pretty much spells the end of us.

The whole point of what the US was founded on was to prevent the tyranny of the whims of one leader without the representation of its people.

We've now crossed the Rubicon of which power can be usurped without following our Constitution.

Even if this gets knocked down in the courts, it sets the precedent that dependent on the right situation, one could eventually break our system of government.

Trump just wiped his ass with the Constitution and the GOP cheered him on. There is no way Democrats should justify this with their own whims. If they do so, it would hasten our demise even quicker.

Like Obama's nuclear deal with Iran....

How quickly we forget.

There is always a tweet.

Repubs must not allow Pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 20, 2014

Can you elaborate further on the analogy you see?

?

How are those two things the same?

I think what he's referring to is that the Iran agreement was fashioned as a Cooperative Plan of Action or something like that and specifically wasn't referred to or treated as a treaty because treaties require Senate approval and Obama wasn't likely to get Senate approval.

I think the analogy falls apart because the Iran agreement had provisions for the next administration to withdraw from it, as Trump did, while declaring a national emergency to build a wall has more concrete long-term effects.

I see what you did there.

The Iranian deal was not voted thru the senate. They didn't have the required votes and it was forced thru. In my opinion, to say Trump is the first president to force his will is not accurate. Obama and others from both sides have done so as well, which is why I find Pelosi's and other Dem's comments today somewhat comedic.

I get what digamma is saying though regarding the wall being more concrete :)

Probably the only way to get significant movement on "more, sensible" gun control. I like the threat and predict a run up of gun/ammo buying before the election.

(I'll have to add to my collection also for a just-in-case)

Pelosi warns GOP: Next presidentÂ*could declare national emergency on guns | TheHill

Up it goes, down it goes, up it goes etc. based on who wins the Presidency.

Trump to NBC reporter Peter Alexander on the national emergency:


“I didn’t need to do this.” “I just want to do it faster.”


That's a lot of lawsuits he just lost.

I think the wall move by Trump is fantastic and I hope it works - I look forward to a future democratic President using this tactic to declare an emergency on gun deaths and another one on the lack of a nationalised health system .... fantastic stuff, thanks Mr. Trump :D

You have to wonder if that sentiment is prominent enough in republicans to strike down the emergency.

If it wasn't so horrifying would be fascinating times we live in.

We just moved back to NJ, and my wife was very clear with her boss we want to remain here. He said that is too bad because he had her tapped for a 3 year assignment in London. Kind if wishing we had gone down a different path.

I can just picture President AOC trying to round up the guns lol

It feels like we're living in a political sim where someone is trying to break things to figure out how the sim engine works.

I'll admit I am just playing this out off the top of my head without any research. But what is the actual cost, given what is likely to happen?

Trump declares the national emergency. The move is challenged in court as unconstitutional. Judges strike it down as not an emergency and an overreach of executive power. Trunp pouts.

Future Dem president tries to do the same thing with guns or healthcare. Same thing happens. Again, no changes.

IMO, I think the only thing that could get by the courts is climate change, as there are real concerns that could be a national and global emergency. But even that would depend on the level of measures requested and how strong the feeling of urgency is.

I think the fear is that the Supreme Court rules 5-4 that the President has wide latitude to define "national emergency" and then it becomes a clusterfuck.

Which I think is what some republicans feared and why they didn't want him to do it. If it fails in court, then less of a chance of Dems trying it. If the SC rules in his favor, though, I don't know if repubs in Senate and the House want to trade a national emergency on the Wall for one on guns and/or health care.

And that is an understandable fear, but my gut (my hope?) is that even conservative judges are going to be at least somewhat reasonable and would not approve egregious violations of the constitution, which this qualifies for, IMO.

They may be conservative but since they aren't by any account nutso like Trump or some of the people backing him, I suspect they will use a lot more reason and logic and uphold the importance of the framing document over the whims of one man.

Because he has positioned the courts to be in favor of overreaching powers by the executive branch.

I don't think the Supreme Court has any desire to touch the case. I think the most likely scenario is it's struck down by a lower federal court and the Supreme Court refuses to hear the appeal.

I disagree. They're not as crazy as he is, even the conservatives.

But if they feel it is an actual emergency it doesn’t become an egregious violation. Let’s also not act like quid pro quo doesn’t exist with regards to recent nominations.

I think they'll pretend to care but actually support the move. They have to give the belief that they are big on the Constitution instead of coming out and outright supporting an Autocrat.

We keep echoing this sentiment about a lot of things surrounding this administration, yet this stuff keeps happening, and getting exponentially worse.

I think you're letting your bias toward assuming the worst of the other side get to you, IMO. I don't think any of the Supreme Court justices are unreasonable, even Cavanaugh.

Well, you're free to feel that way, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Kavanaugh doesn’t think a sitting president should be able to be tried for crimes while in office. I don’t trust his judgment in the least.

The Supreme Court only needs four votes to grant cert.

Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Bob's your uncle.

I hope that SCOTUS stops it as well, but there is definitely more than a zero % chance that SCOTUS takes the President's side on this, especially with a more expanded view of executive power on the bench. Interestingly this may be another case where CJ Roberts has to stop the insanity leading to people on the right calling him Satan.

I was, once again, wrong about Trump. I thought he'd declare the wall built, declare victory, and call it a day. I didn't see the emergency resolution coming.

Pelosi just latched on to this on Twitter.

Agreed. It is definitely more than zero and I don't think Lathum or other Dems are wrong to fear it happening, but I truly don't think it will happen. I think they will strike it down, something like 6-3, 7-2. It won't be close.

If the gap would be that big they won’t even hear it. They talk. It will be 5-4 one way or the other. There is a reason Merrik Garland happened and it’s at our doorstep.

Only plausible if the lower courts smack it down unanimously (or approve it unanimously). If there's a split on a Constitutional question, SCOTUS will almost certainly have to take the case to resolve the split decision.

Neither does the DOJ, going back multiple adminstrations. I don't think that's an extreme view - they should be impeached first, which is the constitutional remedy. Personally I think a big part of the problem is that as a nation we've never been willing to impeach nearly often enough. .

Mueller's team recommends 19-24 years for Manafort,

Starting to see lots of my pro-Trump FB friends posting memes that say "When are politicians going to declare a national emergency over our country's $22 trillion debt?"

Followed by comments cheering on true patriots to resist the liberal agenda that dug that deficit.

After spending an hour last night reading comments on an article about girls in Scouts BSA where everyone was blaming the liberal/transgender agenda for the de-masculinization of society*, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe we shouldn't just burn it all down and start again.

[*] I'm not going to explain the whole girl dens in Boy Scouts thing and how that came about. I'm going to assume you guys can both Google and read, but if you want the tl;dr on it: nobody forced anybody to do anything...unless you want to count market forces from declining enrollment. It was a business decision aimed at growing the market.

I think humans are about to be their own undoing with so much disinformation and tribalism out there. We're mostly smart enough as a species to avoid it, but I think the sheer number of mentally secluded idiots out there are going to eventually overpower the rest of us. Half of them seem to want to accelerate our demise in the name of their god returning to save them. The worse it gets, the more they believe the revelation is upon us.

I wouldn't give us great odds of making it out of this century.