I’ve been thinking a bit about Individual-1’s threats to declare a national emergency so he can build his wall. I’m not 100% wedded to this idea, but It occurs to me that it is a way for him to declare victory while essentially preserving the status quo. The reality is that any such declaration would be mired in the courts for years. One aspect of it that doesn’t, in my humble opinion, get enough attention is that in order to build a wall on the border you have to take private property rights by eminent domain,a process that takes years and will likely be strongly resisted, even by many Trumpers. How you do that when no money has been authorized, in the face of a explicit constitutional amendment requiring both due process and fair compensation, is a puzzle.
But, declaring the emergency may be a way for Trump to tell his base that he’s won and simply allow what is already happening on the border to proceed. This gives him a way to save face while caving on the shutdown issue. He might even get the media to echo those claims.
Were he to go that route, he would nonetheless be guilty of an abuse of power of sufficient magnitude to justify impeachment, but, given the present Republican Party, and the both siderism media that will surely compare it to some act by a Democrat that is not at all really comparable, that’s unlikely to happen, meaning that even though such a declaration might have little tangible effect on the issue it purports to address, it would still be a landmark on our journey toward dictatorship.
UPDATE: For the record, and as further evidence in support of my offer to write a column in the Day, I must point out that I got there first.
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