Do You Want a Shutdown That Lasts "Years"?

The ludicrousness of the Presidents stand on the border wall is now in full view.  He is ‘so proud’ of his stance….a stance that is putting 800,000 of his fellow citizens at economic risk and putting all the rest of us at a disadvantage from severe reduction of services.  That includes impending slowdowns on everything from getting our Social Security payments to air travel.  This is all about a test of Trump’s political libido!  He has no trouble threatening to keep the government closed for 'years' until his autocratic demands are met.

Now, suddenly he has determined that he can declare a ‘national emergency’ and simply re-allocate funds from the Defense budget to build his wall.  Welcome to the new authoritarian world of the United States of America.  What else will he do to accomplish his warped goals?  His objective in this confrontation is all about his flexing his bullheaded muscles rather than intelligent policy.

If ever there was an indicator of how power can be abused and the ‘power of the purse’ be abrogated from the people’s representatives who were duly elected and empowered by the Constitution as a co-equal branch of government, then I don’t know what is!  With the newly empowered Democratic House of Representatives, Trump has now determined that he must show how he can be more powerful than the Congress, even though our founders are turning over in their graves at the thought.

We are in danger now of an unleashed Trump, with no experienced cabinet members to offer up counsel on his decisions as he further abuses his power.  Just look at the lightweights in charge of Defense, Attorney General, Interior, Homeland Security, and Ambassador to the UN. My fear is that when the next real crisis arrives, we will be in big trouble because he will disregard all of them. 

Trump’s ignorance of our history was on full display at his cabinet meeting yesterday where he butchered the facts with regard to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.  In fact there are those in counter-intelligence that are considering investigation into who gave him that information.  It may be Russian messaging that he himself is deciding to promote, or just plain stupidity and ignorance on his part.  Either scenario suggests he is not fit for office.  His foreign policy is a joke.  He is promoting our adversary’s stories.  Putin’s Russia is now trying to rehabilitate their own brutal invasion into Afghanistan and Trump’s accounting of their story is pure fiction!

The big picture is rather simple:  There has never been a President who has been so consummately unfit to fill the office for so many reasons.  The real question is what are we going to do about it.  David Leonhart writes in the New York Times that we could simply wait for the results of investigations to deliver their news and wait for elections to solve the problem:  “Ultimately, however, waiting is too dangerous. The cost of removing a president from office is smaller than the cost of allowing this president to remain.

He has already shown, repeatedly, that he will hurt the country in order to help himself. He will damage American interests around the world and damage vital parts of our constitutional system at home. The risks that he will cause much more harm are growing.  For the country’s sake, there is only one acceptable outcome, just as there was after Americans realized in 1974 that a criminal was occupying the Oval Office. The president must go.”

Happy New Year everyone!