I am now convinced that there is absolutely no action that the president* could take that Mitch McConnell would not endorse. I don't want to hear about how mad McConnell was that Trump submarined him on the negotiations, the collapse of which led to the government shutdown. On Thursday afternoon, after infuriating Chuck Grassley by interrupting him, McConnell carried the message to the country from the White House that the president* would sign the latest funding bill, thereby certifying a monumental failure of his presidency*.
However, McConnell also told the country that, having done so, the president* would declare a national emergency and start moving money around to build his big, beautiful, stupid wall. So McConnell managed to get the president*'s permission for the Senate to do its job, as long as the Senate declares its complicity in his deepest and most beloved fantasy. Leadership!
Between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, most of the Republicans seem to have made a kind of peace with the inevitability of the president*'s behaving like a tinhorn. We should be accustomed to this by now. The president* is going to raid the military. He is going to raid drug interdiction money. He is going to take money appropriated for one purpose and finance his own dark visions. He is lost in his own nightmares, abandoned in his own bigotry. His mind is a writhing ball of snakes. And there is nobody there to stop him. As Starbuck said of Ahab, he is a madman begetting other madmen. His speech was incoherent in thought, contemptuous of intellect, insane with bloodlust, and completely detached from anything that would be recognizable as reality even in Bedlam. Centuries after we ran a mad king off these shores, we now have one of our own.
This is a bill in response to nothing. This is a bill passed in order to address a delusion that the president* has shared with his most fervent supporters. There is no national emergency on the southern border. There isn't going to be a national emergency on the southern border, unless this president* has some other big, beautiful stupid ideas on how to boot brown people out of the country. Everybody voting on this bill knows all of this very well. The entire United States government has been placed in a freight car on the trolley that runs to the Neighborhood of Make Believe.
It can be argued that this precipitous move by the White House is another bit of legerdemain through which the president* can make the Andrew McCabe revelations vanish from the news cycle. That seems less important than usual now that the Senate has decided to share the president*'s delusions and bring us along for the ride.
This is a direct assault by this president* on the Congress's Article I powers. Usually, presidents use these powers to do things like levy sanctions on countries that are slaughtering their own people. What this president* is trying to do is to redirect money already appropriated for a project that Congress already has declined to fund—the last time only a couple of days ago. That is purely a dictatorial action. It is an abuse of power. It cannot be allowed to stand.
The argument being made by some on both the left and the right that, OK, if he can do this, then the next Democratic president can declare a national emergency on gun violence, say, or the climate crisis is sadly beside the point, and Democrats, in particular, should shut up about it. (This means you, Speaker Pelosi.) This is a clear and present danger to the constitutional order. Without the power of the purse, Congress has no power at all.
Mitch McConnell knows this. He even has been warning against this very power grab for a couple of weeks now. But he seems determined to neuter his own institution in order to curry favor with a failed president* and a bunch of idiot pundits from Fox News. He is abandoning his own responsibilities in the hopes that the courts will bail him out. And, again, there is no national emergency to be declared. Not outside of the Oval Office, anyway.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
