Trump 39: The Return of the Wall

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, SilverBeach said:

I have been a federal construction contracting officer. Projects much smaller than this one can take years just for the design and engineering phase. This wall nonsense would take practically forever.

Oh, dear @SilverBeach what is this design and engineering of which you speak? Dumpy thinks they can just toss a bunch of metal or concrete up somewhere along the border.

 

"Words are a president’s strongest weapon. Trump is terrible at words."

Spoiler

The lawyers will fight over the legality and constitutionality of President Trump’s national emergency declaration. What his legal team can’t salvage is the American people’s assessment of his ability to do his job. Trump’s rambling and disjointed explanation for his decision is a perfect example why so many independents and former Republicans find him unacceptable.

The performance really has to be watched to be believed. China, North Korea, Britain and trade policy found their way into the talk. One word seemed to spark a thought and off he would go chasing it, like a dog catching the scent of a truffle and wandering off into a forest in search of it. Other famous moments of presidential free association, like President Reagan’s much derided concluding statements in the first 1984 debate, are Shakespearean in comparison.

Like it or not, words matter when you are president. They are a president’s strongest weapon. With them, he or she can move nations and shift debates. Words can inspire trust between hostile leaders, such as the trust between Reagan and his Soviet adversary Mikhail Gorbachev. With words, a president can move mountains and change the world.

If words fail, a president is left with two weapons to achieve his goals: will and force. The Constitution constrains the president’s ability to achieve much with either of these tools, as the men who wrote it were well aware that these twin brothers are forever the weapons of potential tyrants even if patriots can use them to great effect in times of crisis. For every Lincoln, history shows us a hundred would-be Caesars who use will and force to exalt themselves at the expense of their people.

Trump’s critics have long warned that the president was Caesarean at his core, and they will surely raise that point again in opposing his declaration. But that concern now seems overwrought. Even the modern tyrants whom the president too often unctuously praises demonstrate more facility with language and more attention to governing detail than does he. To borrow from popular culture, Trump looks less like the sinister Emperor Palpatine and more like the hapless Jar Jar Binks.

The moderate independents and former Republicans who have opposed the president look at these displays with disgust. They are disproportionately college-educated, and if there is one thing our universities instill, it is facility with and respect for the use of words. A leader who can’t string together an original coherent paragraph loses these voters’ respect. They couldn’t imagine working for or living with someone so ruled by his instincts rather than his mind, and they can’t imagine entrusting such a person with the most important office in the world.

Yet there is no political future for Trump or his agenda unless at least some of these people change their minds. Their defection gave the Democrats the House. Their votes will determine who becomes president in two years. Even if the Democrats nominate someone whose views trouble them greatly, they won’t hold their nose and vote for Trump a second time if they can’t respect him in the first place.

Everyone has their bad days, and Friday morning’s speech was significantly worse than normal even for a man whose rhetorical style will never be confused with Cicero’s. Reagan used a scripted line about Democratic opponent Walter Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” to earn some laughs and overcome the fallout from his earlier slip. But Reagan was the most eloquent Republican president in well over half a century. He had a deep well of respect to draw upon, as even many of his adversaries marveled at his use of words.

Trump’s friends, advisers and family need to come to grips with this glaring and persistent weakness. Trump must start talking to the college-educated people who resist him and at least try to do so in a manner and language they can understand. If he does not, then his administration will look more and more like an isolated sand castle waiting to be washed away by the tide of public opinion.

I love the line comparing Dumpy to Jar Jar Binks.

[Dandruff]

34 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Oh, dear @SilverBeach what is this design and engineering of which you speak? Dumpy thinks they can just toss a bunch of metal or concrete up somewhere along the border.

I'm sure he'll be trying to micromanage the hell out of it...if it's allowed to happen.

[SilverBeach]

2 minutes ago, Dandruff said:

I'm sure he'll be trying to micromanage the hell out of it...if it's allowed to happen.

It's hella boring and very technical, so I doubt it. He doesn't have the attention span once it's no longer a shiny new thing.

[WiseGirl]

Another day spent yelling at the tv. I have decided I can't wait for the first pictures of the ladders over the wall  holes in the wall, and tunnels under the wall. This is not a national emergency school and workplace shootings are. Whose pockets are getting lined from this wall?

I love all the comfort food ideas.

 Hmmm I have a three day weekend with nothing concrete planned. Should I practice an escape route to Canada drive up to the mountains? Should I be happy my anti anxiety gummies just arrived? 

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

 

[JenniferJuniper]

1 hour ago, Dandruff said:

I'm sure he'll be trying to micromanage the hell out of it...if it's allowed to happen.

It won't happen.  What he's doing is unconstitutional and it'll be stopped.

He doesn't care about a real wall.  He just wants his devotees to see him as someone who is fighting the good fight to keep those brown people the hell out of their country. 

[fraurosena]

The first lawsuit has already been started.

 

 

And that’s not the only one...

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

1 hour ago, WiseGirl said:

This is not a national emergency school and workplace shootings are. 

This.  I just accepted a new job I start in 2 weeks.

A business on the same block had a shooting today, 5 dead.

We have real problems walls won't solve.

[mamallama]

The heart is for sending love not loving the situation.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Dana Milbank: "This Trump performance is why people talk about the 25th Amendment"

Spoiler

It was a fine day for a national emergency.

There was no sign of alarm as administration officials and journalists assembled Friday in the Rose Garden under a perfect blue sky amid unseasonable warmth. Nor was there any sense of crisis conveyed by President Trump, scheduled to fly to his Mar-a-Lago resort later Friday. The much-anticipated emergency declaration was to have been at 10 a.m. At 10:18, an official said Trump would talk in two minutes. At 10:39, Trump emerged.

His topic demanded utmost solemnity: The situation on the border is so dire, such a crisis, that he must invoke emergency powers to circumvent Congress, testing the boundary between constitutional democracy and autocracy. But with the nation watching, Trump instead delivered a bizarre, 47-minute variant of his campaign speech.

He boasted about the economy, military spending and the stock markets (“we have all the records”), and he applauded the Chinese president’s pledge to execute people who deal fentanyl (“one of the things I’m most excited about in our trade deal”). He said Japan’s prime minister had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He declared Ann Coulter “off the reservation” but praised his favorite Fox News hosts and celebrated Rush Limbaugh’s endurance (“try speaking for three hours without taking calls”).

Further, Trump reported on his “great relationship” with the dictator of North Korea (which, Trump reported, is found “right smack in the middle” of South Korea, China and Russia), and he declared the “eradication of the caliphate” in Syria (his top general in the region begs to differ). He introduced his new attorney general, disparaged the Democrats’ “con game,” criticized retired House speaker Paul Ryan, invoked campaign promises, recited the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan and pronounced his reelection prospects excellent. He pinged from regulations to Britain to MS-13 to “monstrous caravans” to an apocryphal story about women gagged with duct tape.

Oh, and he also mentioned his emergency declaration — specifically, that it isn’t necessary. “I didn’t need to do this,” he said in response to a question from NBC’s Peter Alexander. It’s just that the emergency declaration lets him build a border wall “faster.” He acknowledged that “I don’t know what to do with all the money” Congress gave him for border security, and he said that even if he only gets an amount closer to the $1.35 billion Congress authorized for barriers, “it’s going to build a lot of wall.”

Somewhere, administration lawyers were face-palming.

On Thursday came reports that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe had confirmed that Justice Department officials discussed the possibility of removing Trump under the 25th Amendment for incapacity. The president then spent the next 30 hours showing exactly why some people think him incapacitated.

As The Post reported, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spoke on the phone with Trump at least three times Thursday, trying to get Trump to agree to the bipartisan border agreement and avoid another shutdown. When Trump finally agreed — apparently in exchange for McConnell dropping his opposition to an emergency order — the majority leader rushed to the Senate floor to announce it before Trump changed his mind, interrupting an irate Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Earlier, Grassley had offered the Senate his own benediction to supplement the Senate chaplain’s: “Let’s all pray that the president will have wisdom to sign the bill.”

Prayers and frantic reassurance: This is how Republicans deal with an erratic president determined to defy an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress, take money from the military (the Pentagon’s uses for it “didn’t sound too important to me,” Trump said) and set a precedent for future presidents to declare emergencies for their pet projects.

When President Barack Obama attempted a less aggressive use of executive power in 2014, Republicans denounced him as a “tyrant” and “dictator,” McConnell called him an “imperial president,” and Trump himself said Obama “could be impeached” for it. Many lawmakers warned Trump not to “usurp the separation of powers” as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) put it.

Trump seemed not to have heard such warnings as he ricocheted from topic to topic in the Rose Garden. He carried a speech to the lectern but mostly ignored it as he spun fantasies.

Evidence that most of the illegal drugs pass through legal border crossings? “It’s all a lie.”

CNN’s Jim Acosta pointed out that border crossings are near record lows and illegal immigrants are not disproportionately criminal.

“You’re fake news,” Trump replied.

Playboy’s Brian Karem asked Trump to “clarify where you get your numbers.”

“Sit down,” Trump told him, declaring that “I use many stats.” Minutes later, he pumped a fist in the air and departed.

“What about the 25th Amendment?” Acosta called after him.

Trump’s performance had already provided a compelling answer.

 

[SilverBeach]

1 hour ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

This.  I just accepted a new job I start in 2 weeks.

A business on the same block had a shooting today, 5 dead.

We have real problems walls won't solve. 

Yeah, I doubt that today's shooter Gary Martin is from South America. There is enough home-grown violence in this country. 

[AmazonGrace]

Because nothing says emergency like missing your tee time 

 

 

[fraurosena]

I wonder how many will sign? And more importantly, who?

[fraurosena]

 

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

 

I  was reading that speech thinking that it reads like an SNL parody.  It's so crazy that my brain wants to interpret it as a joke. 

I wish we could exit the Bizzarro World we are currently suffering through and go back to the Land of Rational Thoughts and General Sanity.

[Howl]

Let this be a small comfort 

 

[AmazonGrace]

What happened to his tan

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Finish that wall’: Trump seeks to turn his failure to build the wall into campaign rallying cry"

Spoiler

President Trump and his political team plan to make his years-long quest for a border wall one of the driving themes of his reelection effort — attempting to turn his failure to build such a project into a combative sales pitch that pits him against the political establishment on immigration.

Trump has declared a national emergency to secure the funds Congress has repeatedly denied him despite his own admission that the move is likely to get tied up in court. This move has galvanized many of his supporters even as others on the right remain dubious and disappointed.

His campaign is fundraising off his showdown with congressional Democrats over the border — portraying the opposition party as more interested in political games than the public’s safety.

And faced with the fact that he has yet to build an inch of the concrete or steel wall he promised, Trump and his campaign have started relying on a rhetorical sleight of hand: speaking the wall into existence.

“Now, you really mean, ‘Finish that wall,’ because we’ve built a lot of it,” Trump falsely claimed at a campaign rally Monday in El Paso after supporters broke out in chants of “Build that wall!”

As he spoke, giant placards with the words “Finish the Wall” hung from the rafters, an unmistakable signal Trump’s aides say reflects the campaign’s growing push to convince the president’s supporters that the border barrier they imagined him building is already real.

These endeavors underscore the extent to which Trump and his allies are attempting to make 2020 a repeat of 2016 — centered on a portrayal of the nation as under siege from criminal immigrants and other dark forces, and reliant upon a die-hard base of older whites in rural areas.

The strategy comes with serious risks. It largely assumes that despite Trump’s poor poll numbers and his setback in the midterms, he remains popular enough to rely on the same strategy that delivered him the White House through a thin electoral college victory even as he lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.

“He used immigration pretty effectively in 2018 to motivate voters, but the question is whether it’s going to be enough in the states he needs in 2020,” said Jennifer E. Duffy, a nonpartisan election analyst at the Cook Political Report. “In places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and Arizona, can it get the job done?”

Duffy added that if Democrats nominate a strong presidential nominee, Trump might find himself fighting “the last war” as the electorate adjusts to new choices and new debates.

Trump’s Republican allies remain confident and said his messaging in recent weeks — however bungled — is nevertheless setting him up for the 2020 presidential election, both in framing the wall as a motivating tool for his core voters and underscoring his commitment to border security.

“You can argue about the details, but strategically, it works,” said former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally.

“The president wants Beto O’Rourke out there, in contrast, saying that walls kill people and we shouldn’t have walls. That could be a snapshot of the 2020 election,” Gingrich said of the former Democratic congressman from Texas, a potential presidential contender.

Critics say the president’s exaggerated claims about ongoing wall construction will ultimately backfire, undermining his ability to sell himself as a master negotiator who can work his will in Washington.

“The president has always survived by living inside a reality-distortion field,’’ said Tim O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald” (2005). “When things don’t go his way, he simply creates another narrative.”

Trump’s claims that the wall is well underway have intensified and become more descriptive in recent weeks as he weathered a record-breaking government shutdown over wall money and bipartisan negotiations to stave off a second lapse in federal funding.

“The wall is very, very on its way,” Trump told a conference of law enforcement officials Wednesday. “It’s happening as we speak . . . and it’s a big wall. It’s a strong wall. It’s a wall the people aren’t going through very easy.”

On Friday, Trump signed a bill that included $1.375 billion for fencing and other expenditures, a far cry from the $5.7 billion he previously demanded. That money can also only go toward building the type of barriers already in use, not the concrete wall Trump highlighted during the campaign and early in his presidency.

By declaring a national emergency, the White House is attempting to bypass Congress and repurpose more than $6 billion from the Pentagon and other agencies to fund wall construction, but Democrats said they will attempt to stop the move legislatively and in the courts.

“What you’re seeing is the mother of all pivots,” said veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy, a Trump critic.

He’s trying to turn being outfoxed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) “into a win by creating a rally cry for the reelect campaign,” he said. “For his core base, it’ll ameliorate some of the criticism. But it won’t help him with general-election voters. He’s playing survival politics with his own base and using the illusion of success.”

Trump has been building up to this strategy for much of the past year, as conservative angst mounted over the lack of progress on the wall while Republicans had full legislative control. Democrats took back the House in last year’s midterm elections, all but killing Trump’s chances of securing adequate funding to build hundreds of miles of wall on the border.

The president’s original promise, to make Mexico pay for the wall, also remains unfulfilled, succumbing to a political reality that was long obvious despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

The president has complained repeatedly about news coverage depicting the wall as not being built and has told his campaign and communications officials they have to convince people that more of the wall is being built.

He has sought to meet with contractors about the wall, even giving specifics on how tall the wall should be.

Trump has repeatedly looked to unorthodox places to get wall money. For example, he has discussed using money meant to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria to fund the wall. During a recent presidential trip to the border, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told Trump that pulling funds from Puerto Rico could jeopardize financial aid to Florida and Texas, which were also hit hard by natural disasters. Still, the option remains on the table for future expenditures toward the wall, two White House officials said.

While Trump has expressed frustration over Republicans not providing funding for his wall during the first two years of his presidency, GOP congressional leaders have been irritated at times by his shifting demands and lack of attention to the specifics of the legislative debate.

The $5 billion he demanded earlier this year was an arbitrary number, aides said, after he grew frustrated that Congress only gave him $1.6 billion — even though his own aides sought that amount. Trump has often talked about the wall, but current and former White House officials say it has not been a top priority among senior aides. There has been no designated point person on the issue, and Trump’s agitation and concern often waxes and wanes.

Several times since taking office, Trump has redefined what he considers a wall. While his administration funded wall prototypes that were to be built of solid concrete or steel, Congress has placed restrictions into funding bills that only allow for previously deployed fencing designs. Trump has since claimed that such fences, including renovations that replace existing barriers, constitute the wall he promised.

During the last government shutdown, Trump told advisers that Democrats would be more inclined to support the wall if it was called a “steel slat barrier” or some other phrase. But eventually he relented, realizing there was no support for the wall no matter what he called it. 

Polls show most voters blamed the president for the government shutdown, though Trump has since cast it as a strategic win, despite the fact that it did not produce the wall funding he wanted.

According to a person who spoke with the president Monday, Trump has argued that he will eventually be able to claim that he “shut down the government over this wall” and that his supporters will approve.

Some of the president’s allies have said that politically, Trump’s “finish the wall” rhetoric should be interpreted more metaphorically than literally.

“The point of the wall is to show how the president is committed to border security and painting Democrats into a corner as being against that,” said former White House legislative director Marc Short.

“Finish the wall,’’ he said, “is a good message as long as the wall is a metaphor for border security.”

A White House official said it is even broader than that.

 “Finish the wall is really: ‘Finish what we started.’ It’s about the Trump presidency, more than anything,” said the official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s telling the voters to stick with us, finish what we started, as the Democrats pursue the Green New Deal or Medicare-for-all.” 

Veteran Democrats acknowledge the power of Trump’s pitch in a deeply divided nation but question whether it can work again in 2020 in the same way it worked with some swing voters in 2016.

“It’s an applause line that has emotional resonance — and it’s completely irrational,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “There is, I think, a broad majority of Americans who are really fed up with the false contention that the wall is somehow the equivalent to border security. It’s a vanity project for the president.”

Many moderate Republicans, such as Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), a former FBI agent who represents the Philadelphia suburbs, have noticed Trump’s evolving updates on the wall — and have grown frustrated with his insistence on calling for a wall. 

“I never even use the term wall,” Fitzpatrick said. “That conjures up images of a brick-and-mortar structure, from sea to shining sea, when it’s far more complicated.”

Democrats have pledged to file legal challenges to Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, setting up a constitutional clash over the president’s attempt to usurp spending power from Congress.

A court battle could stretch out for months or years, but Trump is already determined to tell his supporters he is moving full speed ahead on building the border wall.

“He fashions his own reality,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. “It’s like John Kennedy going out after the Bay of Pigs and saying, ‘What a great victory.’ But for [Trump’s] base, I’m just not sure that it matters to them.”

 

[Howl]

I just stumbled across this and had a WTAF moment. The is from Business Insider and dated January 11, 2019:  Mattis reportedly told Trump before he resigned that a national emergency was the most realistic option to get the wall and the Pentagon could help build it

Note that there is no confirmation from Mattis that he said this. I find it of interest that neither article referenced below says who was present when Mattis told Trump about this,  just "according to people briefed on the conversation."  

Wall Street Journal had a brief reference to this in a piece published  January 10, 2019, the day before the Business Insider article: 

White House Aides Explore Alternative Ways to Pay for Border Wall  One option: Halt military construction projects and divert those funds for an emergency

This is the paragraph referring to Mattis, who I don't think has made any public statement since leaving Department of Defense at the end of December. 

Quote

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is among those internally pushing for Mr. Trump to declare an emergency, officials said. About two months before he resigned, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Mr. Trump that a national emergency was a realistic option and that the Pentagon could help get the wall built, according to people briefed on the conversation. Mr. Mattis couldn’t be reached for comment on Thursday.

Anyway, that the then Secretary of Defense would promote this as an option and suggest using money already allocated for military construction projects, including desperately needed housing for military families is just...crazy.  I've seen zero other references to this, and I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been dug up since the national emergency was signed yesterday.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"In declaring a national emergency, Trump reminds Republicans: It’s all about him"

Spoiler

Though he expects loyalty from Republicans, President Trump has never demonstrated much fidelity to the party that he leads, and on Friday he proved it again. In declaring a national emergency to fund his border wall, the president reminded Republican lawmakers that he feels free to trample on them whenever it suits him.

Trump was a solitary, and unscripted, figure when he spoke on Friday in the Rose Garden. His presentation was rambling and unfocused. He talked about trade with China and Great Britain, negotiations with North Korea, and the economy and the stock market before getting to the prime topic. Though he cast many of those things in upbeat terms, it was not a performance by a president who believes he is winning.

This was, however, a more authentic Trump than the politician the nation saw two weeks ago, when he gave his State of the Union address. In that setting, Trump’s speech was laced with appeals for bipartisanship, tributes to genuine American heroes and initiatives that seemed unusual to this president and designed to attract voters outside his core coalition who aren’t with him but might be needed for his reelection campaign.

In the House chamber that night, the nation saw the heavily scripted Trump, a teleprompter politician who delivered his lines as written and who had his party enthusiastically behind him. He even got some applause from the Democrats, which is no small thing. His approval ratings went up afterward, though history suggests such spikes are usually transitory.

Trump was in a weakened position when he gave his State of the Union, coming as it did after a searing defeat in his first confrontation with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the new Democratic majority in the House. That deadlock over funding for a border wall resulted in a 35-day government shutdown from which the president emerged empty-handed.

Trump was in the Rose Garden on Friday because he had suffered a second and seemingly definitive setback at the hands of Congress, this time with the help of Republicans. When Trump had agreed to reopen the government absent a deal on the border late last month, he had put the fate of his border wall in the hands of House and Senate negotiators.

Trump must have imagined that he would do better than during the first round, though there was little evidence to suggest Democrats were likely to budge or Republicans were prepared to risk another shutdown by holding the line for the president. As a result, the bipartisan negotiators agreed on $1.375 billion for the border wall.

There was no way for the president to spin the outcome as a victory, and he is clearly unhappy with the deal. He reportedly complained that he could have done a better job of negotiating, though he had passed up better deals at several points over many months. Once again, he proved he is far from the master dealmaker that he long has claimed to be.

If there was no appetite on Capitol Hill for a second shutdown, there also wasn’t much of one for having the president declare a national emergency to circumvent Congress to pay for a wall.

Republicans had warned the president against such a move, knowing that it would represent a usurpation of congressional power over spending and that a future Democratic president could invoke the same power for issues such as gun control or climate change if the declaration survives a lengthy series of court challenges.

But Trump’s unhappiness played out late in the week in ways that again told Republican lawmakers that loyalty is a one-way street with him. He agreed to sign the new funding agreement, but it came at the cost of forcing Republican officials to bend to his will on the declaration of a national emergency.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was the highest-profile Republican who collapsed under pressure from Trump, announcing on the Senate floor Thursday that Trump would declare an emergency and that he would support the declaration. It was another pathetic moment for the concept of the separation of powers.

On Friday, Trump said he was declaring an emergency because of a national security crisis on the border, “an invasion” as he put it. Government statistics show border crossings are low compared to past years. Trump said he had statistics that proved otherwise. (The biggest crisis on the border this past year has been one caused by the Trump administration’s decision to separate children from their parents, something still being sorted out.)

Remarkably, the president didn’t even make a strong case to support his decision. In fact, he did the opposite. He went so far as to acknowledge that he was declaring an emergency only as a way to speed up the process of building a wall. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time,” he said. “I didn’t need to do this. I’d rather do it much faster.”

Trump’s words are not a statement that Justice Department lawyers, who will be defending the declaration against expected court challenges, will likely welcome.

Though he claimed the decision had nothing to do with the 2020 election, Trump sounded like a politician who was playing to his base by promising to deliver a core promise from his 2016 campaign.

For Republican lawmakers, these past weeks have been a bracing reminder of the man who hijacked their party in 2016 and re-created it in his image, a man who has forced them to live with the consequences. Their relationship remains fraught, as this whole episode has illustrated. Look at the record.

Trump upended one spending agreement, after signaling acceptance, which caused the government to shut down for a record length of time and caused embarrassment for McConnell. He stubbornly allowed the shutdown to run to the point of pain for federal workers, disruption for those who depend on government services and political worries for fellow Republicans. Only then did he cut his losses. In declaring a national emergency, he flagrantly ignored the advice of many in the GOP hierarchy and caused them to buy into something they think is a mistake.

The president is still a long way from having the money to build the kind of wall he promised during the campaign, though he has shown his base he is willing to take extraordinary action to fulfill that promise. For this president, that may be everything. For those in the party he controls, especially those in Congress, the week was another reminder that, when it comes to Trump, it’s all about him and rarely about them.

 

[Howl]

I googled a bit more re: Mattis suggesting a national emergency to build the wall.

Back in Sept., Dept of Homeland Security requested that Dept. of Defense look into ways that it could fund and build at least some of the wall along 32 miles of border by the Air Force’s Barry M. Goldwater bombing range near Yuma, AZ, a heavily used area with unexploded ordnance. 

Even in Sept. 2018, a national emergency scenario had been discussed, but by whom is not clear.  There was also an option to declare that particular section of the wall "vital for national security" to do an end run around environmental impact statements and other regulatory requirements. 

As reported by the Daily Mail, Democratic senators warn Pentagon chief not build border barrier along a bombing range in Arizona calling it a 'wasteful and unjustified expenditure' Congress has not authorized

As recently as December 10, 2018, Democratic senators sent Mattis a snippy letter; Mattis had apparently not made a decision at that point re: Homeland Security's September request and since he resigned 10 days later, probably made no decision at all. Be interesting to see what Shanahan does. 

Quote

Democratic senators warned the president's Pentagon chief on Monday that a plan to use defense funds build border barriers in Arizona would be controversial if carried out and unauthorized.  

Sens. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, Patrick Leahy, the vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Dick Durbin and Brian Schatz told Defense Secretary James Mattis in a letter that the Navy did not provide a compelling argument for studies on 31 miles of barriers along a bombing range near Yuma.

The project would divert as much as $450 million in funds that were intended for military readiness activities, they insisted.

'We believe the Department of Defense lacks any authorization or appropriations needed to move this project into any stage of construction during fiscal year 2019,' the senators said. 

If Mattis wanted to use the money to build border barriers, he should have done so during the appropriations process, instead of trying to short-circuit Congress, they said.

They gave him a slap on the wrist for spending millions on site surveys for the project that did not receive any congressional input at all. 

In their letter, the senators told Mattis that he should not attempt to circumvent the legislative body by making use of a code that authorizes the military to provide a support role in counternarcotics operations along the border. 

'We urge you in the strongest possible fashion to refrain from considering using this authority or 10 U.S.C. 284 for this potential $450 million border wall project,' they wrote.  

Mattis has been considering the project at the Barry M. Goldwater Range at the request of Department of Homeland Security.

Anyway, just more pieces of the Wall puzzle. It's also interesting going back to see who was promoting what options over time and who was against declaring a national emergency (Kellyanne and Jared), because, stupid idea that's now been confirmed as stupid. 

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

What happened to his tan

Trump didn't realize that his personal assistant had been buying his self-tanner in bulk through Amazon, and is scared that the lady who does Melania's tan will poison him if he lets her spray him. 

If you are spending $200,000 a year to be a member of some fancy club, shouldn't it look better than that old hotel down by the airport that keeps getting dinged by the health department?

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]