Fake emergency, real power grab
Last week President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to stop an “invasion” through the U.S. border with Mexico. The invaders are “rapists, drug dealers, terrorists and other bad hombres.”
What invasion?
George Washington, the first president, was a man who could not tell a lie, the legend goes. Donald Trump, our latest president, is a man who cannot tell the truth, and that’s no legend.
As everything with Trump, the whole emergency thing is a lie.
There is no national security emergency; a president, even this one, does not leave Washington to play golf in Florida amid a national security emergency.
There is no invasion. Undocumented immigration has been declining for decades. A high percentage of undocumented immigrants are visa over-stayers, not border crossers.
There is no immigration-driven crime wave. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives. Crime has been decreasing sharply for years.
There are no caravans full of terrorists, just families huddling together to fend off criminals that prey on immigrants.
Drugs are not pouring in through the remote areas where most of the wall would be built. They come in through designated and heavily policed ports of entry, on planes and ships and by road, hidden inside trucks and cars. Many of the most lethal drugs are unnecessary pain medications prescribed by American doctors who in return get money and other perks from the pharmaceutical companies that profit from the sale of the highly addictive pills.
Trump’s words and actions are the best proof the emergency is fake. Emergency implies urgency. The President declared a national emergency, then said he didn’t need to do it now. He could do it later but he was just in a hurry to get the wall he promised his base during the 2016 campaign built. That’s political expediency, not national security emergency. And, oh, by the way, the commander in chief left Washington to go golfing in Florida right after declaring an emergency. The captain does not jump ship amid an emergency. Not even this captain.
Immigrants are convenient scapegoats for problems like drugs, crime, and terrorism but they are not the source of these social maladies. Trump’s emergency declaration won’t solve the problems of crime or drugs. But that’s not its real purpose.
The declaration of an emergency will allow the president to claim to his base that he is well on his way to building ‘The Wall’ as he promised to do during the 2016 campaign. That claim too is false. The money he aims to grab from the defense budget won’t get him that much wall. And he may get no money at all; the courts are likely to rule that diverting any money appropriated by Congress for other purposes in order to build a wall is unconstitutional. And there is one thing is for sure. Mexico will not pay for The Wall.
The Wall was always a mirage, a symbol of the radical difference between north and south, between shithole countries and a nation becoming great again by keeping people from those kinds of countries out. The irony is that for Trump to get his wall, he is planning to ride roughshod over two things that are already great about the United States, namely the Constitution and the separation of powers.
With his emergency declaration, Trump is attempting what amounts to a coup against the Constitution and the House of Representatives. Article 1 of the Constitution grants the House the power of the purse. If the president usurps the power of Congress to appropriate money, he neutralizes Congress as a co-equal power.
What makes an executive branch coup against the legislative branch really scary is what has been happening to the third branch of government, the judicial branch, the only force capable of blocking Trump’s strike against democracy. For years, The GOP has been busy packing courts at all levels with right-wing judges. Under Trump, this process has accelerated and reached deeper, into the Supreme Court itself. That’s the reason Trump figures he can get away with his unacknowledged putsch.
Trump and the Republicans, with the support of only a minority of voters in 2016 and 2018, are now setting the stage for a monolithic right-wing government unchecked by Congress and the courts. Democracy in America has seldom, if ever, been in such peril.
