Trump wants to build the wall but...

[boutons_deux]

Here's a list of the 31 national emergencies that have been in effect for years

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/list...ry?id=60294693

[boutons_deux]

This All Seems to Be Going Well

we’re starting to learn just how badly he’s been handling the mess he created.

To put it mildly, he’s ing it all up.

Trump was reportedly waffling extremely hard on whether or not to sign the bipartisan budget deal hammered out by Congress to ensure the country wasn’t subjected to another government shutdown. Per the Washington Post:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was

on the phone with Trump at least three times during the course of the nerve-racking day,

pressing him to stay the course and asserting that Democrats had actually lost the spending fight, two people familiar with the conversations said.

Never a good sign when someone smarter than you

has to insist that the crow you’re being forced to eat

is actually a delicious gourmet meal

(or in Trump’s case: a badly cooked steak). But perhaps even more embarrassing is this, again from the Post (emphasis mine):

Though White House officials insisted Thursday that Trump was acting in a defiant and assertive way, few Republicans, including the president’s closest allies, were pleased with the ending: $1.375 billion for fencing and other expenditures, plus an emergency gambit that many conservatives view as an executive overreach.

Republicans, for their part, are doing an admirable job at pretending to be very mildly concerned over Trump’s cons utionally dubious gambit...before they inevitably fall into line behind him.

“I wish he wouldn’t have done it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley told Politico.

Sen. Rand Paul also told the website, adding: “So I’m not really for it.”


quotes from some extremely bootlick-y congressional Republicans who also spoke with Politico:

• “I have some concerns” - Sen. Roy Blunt.
  
• “I’m not enthusiastic about it” - Sen. Pat Toomey.
  
• “I always kind of take pause to the assertion of executive power” - Sen. Thom Tillis.
  
• “I think it’s fine” - Sen. Kevin Cramer.

https://splinternews.com/this-all-seems-to-be-going-well-1832646918?utm_source=splinter_newsletter&utm_medi um=email&utm_campaign=2019-02-15

[boutons_deux]

MSNBC’s Chuck Todd hilariously mocks Mike Pence’s executive overreach hypocrisy with 2014 attack on Obama video





“Take a listen to the future vice president of the United States, right after Barack Obama issued an executive order.”

“I think it would be a profound mistake for the president of the United States to overturn American immigration law with the stroke of a pen,”

Obama, Pence went on, “ought to sit down” with Republicans, saying “that’s what leadership looks like.”

“‘That’s what leadership looks like, work across the aisle, listen to Congress,'” Todd laughed.

“That’s what you have to do. That’s what Governor Mike Pence said.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/msn...e+Raw+Story%29

[boutons_deux]

‘A recipe for disaster’? Trump’s border emergency drags the GOP into a risky fight ahead of 2020.

puts GOP lawmakers — including many vulnerable senators up for reelection in the next cycle — in the position of

having to choose between

their party’s leader and

their self-described opposition to executive overreach.

If they back Trump’s emergency declaration,

many lawmakers worry, they will be greenlighting a White House power grab that infringes on Congress’s cons utional power over spending.

But

if they oppose it, they risk attracting the wrath of Trump’s political base — and perhaps a primary challenge.

unclear whether even the most vocal GOP critics of Trump’s move will actually vote to disapprove of his emergency declaration,

administration aides have urged lawmakers to keep their powder dry for now rather than stating how they’d vote publicly.

Looming above it all is the

possibility of an epic cons utional standoff between the White House and Congress that could be seriously damaging to Republicans.

“It is a recipe for disaster for McConnell and his flock of Senate Republicans up in 2020,”

“no-win situation.”

“Choose Trump and the emergency declaration and offend moderates, or

upset Trump and risk being toppled in a Trump-fueled primary challenge.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...=.96a8cb1303d8

[Winehole23]

Day 2 of the national emergency: Trump hits the front nine.

[benefactor]

Day 2 of the national emergency: Trump hits the front nine.

[Blake]

Day 2 of the national emergency: Trump hits the front nine.

Lol

[Winehole23]

Commies at CATO debunk the emergency:

https://www.cato.org/blog/there-no-n...r-mr-president

[Winehole23]

[DMX7]

Lol I missed this.

There is literally a Trump tweet from the past for everything. There has never been a bigger walking talking contradiction than Donald Trump.

[DMX7]

Someone help me understand this....

So Trump wants us to believe that he's a brilliant negotiator because he got $1.2B for the wall ... but then he says what he successfully negotiated for the wall is supposedly so paltry that it's literally a national emergency?

[boutons_deux]

The Pentagon could deny Trump national emergency funds, defense secretary says

Patrick Shanahan, the acting US Secretary of Defense, said hours after Donald Trump’s emergency declaration that

he could refuse to direct billions of dollars in Pentagon funds Trump is relying on to build a wall on the US’s southern border.
“Very deliberately we have not made any decisions,” about how the defense department will respond to Trump’s declaration,

Shanahan told reporters as he returned from a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq.

“There’s been no determinations by me” that a wall is necessary, he said, while

making it very clear that he believes he has the authority to determine how any military funds will be spent and military personnel deployed.
https://qz.com/1552689/the-pentagon-...ecretary-says/

So this corporate for Boeing is going to defy Trash?

[boutons_deux]

Sen. Lindsey Graham Continues to Kiss Trump’s Ass, at the Expense of School Kids

He said, “I would say [the wall] is better for the middle school kids” than building new schools

https://www.rollingstone.com/politic...school-796053/

[boutons_deux]

Trump’s use of “national emergency” powers to build the wall just went up in flames

reallocating money from unspent Defense Department budgets has hit a major speed bump.

much of the money that the president was counting on being available to transfer to his border wall

has already been spent.

John M. Donnelly, a senior writer for the Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call, broke the story on Twitter late today that

more than a third of the money that Trump was coveting for constructing his easily surmounted border barrier was not actually within his reach after all.

Trump can no longer threaten to shut the government down over his demands for more money now that his severe case of border wall erectile dysfunction has been exposed.

an administration as incompetent as President Trump’s would fail to properly research the status of the funds that it built its entire cons utional assault upon,

https://washingtonpress.com/2019/02/...8GiiLMQDwxxM4k

[boutons_deux]

58 Former National Security Officials Decry Trump’s Border Wall And Bogus Emergency

there was “no plausible” justification for declaring a national emergency.

“We have lived and worked through national emergencies, and we support the President’s power to mobilize the Executive Branch to respond quickly in genuine national emergencies,”

“But under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that en les the President to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border.”

“The President’s actions are at odds with the overwhelming evidence in the public record, including the administration’s own data and estimates,”

A Cato Ins ute analysis showed that undo ented immigrants in Texas are 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born U.S. citizens,

a border wall will not reduce human and drug trafficking because most opioids are brought in through ports of entry and because most victims of human trafficking arrive in the U.S. with valid visas.

A group of 16 states has also filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the emergency declaration, calling it uncons utional.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/forme...gEmail__022619

[boutons_deux]

GOP Needs More Time to Read the 70-word "Emergency Terminator" Bill








https://www.dailykos.com/stories/201...erminator-Bill

[Nbadan]

Border wall divides Texas: Lone Star voters evenly split on need for barrier, poll finds

WASHINGTON – The goal of President Donald Trump's proposed border wall is to separate the U.S. and Mexico, but it has ended up splitting Texas in two.

Voters of the Lone Star State are evenly divided over the need for a wall on the southern border of the U.S., although a clear majority opposes the use of a national emergency declaration to get funding for it, according to a poll from Quinnipiac University that was released Tuesday.

About 48 percent of Texas voters oppose the construction of the wall and 48 percent support it, according to the poll. Republican support for the wall remains high, with 87 percent in favor and 11 percent against. Democrats, on the other hand, oppose the wall 90 percent to 7 percent.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bo...GQH?li=BBnb4R7

Texans are gonna love eminent domain......I know it...

[boutons_deux]

Border wall divides Texas: Lone Star voters evenly split on need for barrier, poll finds



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bo...GQH?li=BBnb4R7

Texans are gonna love eminent domain......I know it...

Remember BigOil got their pipeline ruled a common carrier (carrying for more than one company) so they could rape through East TX with eminent domain.

Repugs are apparently "conflicted" about eminent domain takings for the wall, but they, less and bent over, will let Trash "have his way" with them.

[boutons_deux]

Bulldozers sit idle at border amid legal confusion over Trump’s emergency

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-border-construction-national-emergency-20190226-story.html

pix of "work on the beautiful wall" are fraudulent, showing only maintenance on existing structures

[boutons_deux]

Congress’s Cowardly “Emergency” Rebuke

Democrats have a majority in the House and Trump has served them up, on a veritable silver platter, a

clear-cut, air-tight, irrefutable case for his own impeachment.

Twice in the last two months, Congress has denied Trump funding for his wall,

weathering the longest partial “government shutdown” in US history rather than give it to him in December and

denying it a second time with the funding bill he signed in February.

Congress saying “no” when the president asks for money is not an “emergency.”

He only gets to spend the money they give him, and

he only gets to spend that money on the things they’ve told him he can spend it on.

As Article I, Section 9 of the US Cons ution puts it,

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury,

but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

That’s one of many provisions in the Cons ution that make the US a representative democracy with separation of powers rather than a monarchy or dictatorship.

Trump’s declaration of a fake “national emergency” was

actually a declaration that he is now an absolute monarch, a dictator, no longer accountable to Congress for his actions.

If that’s not covered by the Cons ution’s “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” clause outlining grounds for impeachment, what is?

And if Congress isn’t prepared to respond accordingly,

why should they — or we — bother with the continuing charade that they, or the law, matter at all?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02...rgency-rebuke/

[TSA]

NYT fake news

[Pavlov]

NYT fake news

Do you want a full sea-to-sea border wall to be built?

Yes or no.

[TSA]

Do you want a full sea-to-sea border wall to be built?

Yes or no.

No it’s not necessary. And who is calling for that?

[Pavlov]

No it’s not necessary. And who is calling for that?

Oh. Are you for the emergency?

[TSA]

Oh. Are you for the emergency?

Question pending. Who is calling for a full sea-to-sea border wall to be built?