POLITICAL DISCUSSION FORUMS › Forums › US NEWS & OPINION › McConnell: Trump to sign bill, declare emergency…
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Jean.
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February 14, 2019 at 12:29 #10522
Johnny Yuma
ParticipantWay to go President Trump…
McConnell: Trump to sign bill, declare emergency…
enate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says President Donald Trump has indicated he’s prepared to sign the government funding bill and issue a national emergency on the border.
McConnell said Thursday the Senate will soon vote on the bill that’s needed to avoid a partial federal shutdown Friday.
The comprise measure keeps departments running through the fiscal year but without the $5.7 billion Trump wanted for the border wall with Mexico.
The House is also expected to vote on the bill later Thursday.
Trump’s assent would end a raucous legislative saga that commenced before Christmas and saw Trump force a record 35-day partial federal shutdown.
This is a developing story. Check back later for more.
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February 14, 2019 at 12:47 #10523
Johnny Yuma
ParticipantThe democrats lost 2020 when they put illegals over citizens of this country. There is something broken in their thinking because they lack common sense…
February 14, 2019 at 14:07 #10524Gur
ParticipantThat bill sucks. It benefits the continued illegal alien invasion. Trump should tell them to go to hell, and bypass their traitorous legislation. The dems & rinos limit the wall to $1.7 billion. A year ago they gave $8 billion to Syria to build a wall – but they won’t protect American citizens, instead favoring turdworld lowlifes with the goal of trashing the U.S.
Bangity-bang-bang-bang……
Capricorn posted on November 15, 2019 at 09:15
Adult language is permitted if it is contextual and not aimed personally at a poster.
February 14, 2019 at 14:40 #10525Desert_Fox
ParticipantThe democrats lost 2020 when they put illegals over citizens of this country. There is something broken in their thinking because they lack common sense…
The Democrats wiped ass on the Republicans in the House in 2018 and little has changed since then. I don’t know what you’re smoking but I hope you have a good supply of it because if 2018 is any indication you’re fucked.
". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast
February 14, 2019 at 14:43 #10526Desert_Fox
ParticipantThat bill sucks. It benefits the continued illegal alien invasion. Trump should tell them to go to hell, and bypass their traitorous legislation. The dems & rinos limit the wall to $1.7 billion. A year ago they gave $8 billion to Syria to build a wall – but they won’t protect American citizens, instead favoring turdworld lowlifes with the goal of trashing the U.S. Bangity-bang-bang-bang……
Your disregard or inability to grasp reality is oh so evident in your posts. Keep it up, several of us enjoy laughing at your jabberty jibbity.
". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast
February 14, 2019 at 15:50 #10545Gale
ParticipantGo ahead Donald. Set a precedent that will allow your Democratic successor to declare National Emergencies on Climate Change and Gun Control. #BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) February 14, 2019
“I take no responsibility at all.” Donald Trump
“Anyone who wants a test can get a test.” Donald TrumpFebruary 14, 2019 at 21:13 #10562Desert_Fox
ParticipantGreg Sargent – The Washington Post
Trump’s declaration will only underscore his raging, delusional impotence
President Trump first said he might declare a national emergency on the grounds that we need a border wall to save our country from sliding into chaos well over a month ago. This emergency was so urgent that he acted on this threat of a declaration promptly thereafter.
Oh, wait, that’s not what happened at all. First Trump tried to shut down the government to get his wall, but that failed, and he caved, agreeing to reopen the government for three weeks, while a conference committee tried to work out a long term funding deal. That went on for two weeks, until Republicans reached a deal in which they effectively told Trump the gig is up and it’s time to surrender. Trump seemed inclined to sign that, and even suggested he’d just keep on saying the wall was getting built and that he was winning.
But then right wing media called him weak, and Trump apparently realized he could no longer paper over his humiliating loss with lies. Which is why Trump will now finally make good on his threat:
President Trump is prepared to sign a massive spending and border security deal, while at the same time declaring a national emergency to get more money to build his border wall, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday.McConnell made the announcement on the Senate floor, and told senators to prepare to vote shortly on the legislation that would stave off a government shutdown Friday at midnight.
“The president will sign the bill. We’ll be voting on it shortly,” McConnell said.
McConnell also said he’d told the president he would support the emergency declaration, which would allow the president to circumvent Congress and use the military to build his wall. McConnell has voiced opposition for weeks to the idea of Trump declaring a national emergency.The White House, in a statement, confirmed that Trump will sign the new government funding bill. Trump will then “take other executive action — including a national emergency — to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border,” said press secretary Sarah Sanders, lying in the face of America about the nonexistent national security “crisis.”
McConnell’s declaration that he will support the president’s national emergency is remarkable in its cravenness, since it comes after McConnell and Senate Republicans warned Trump for weeks against it. But this also provides a big opening for House Democrats.It goes like this: Speaker Nancy Pelosi can hold a vote passing a resolution terminating Trump’s national emergency, and that will initiate a process that, under the National Emergencies Act, will compel a vote on the resolution by the GOP-controlled Senate. One expert recently told this blog that under the law, such a vote would end up taking place within around five weeks.
At a presser just now, Pelosi said that she might take this route. My presumption is that this hedge is largely because Trump has not actually declared the emergency yet. But regardless, there is a very strong case for Pelosi doing this. Now that McConnell has confirmed that he will back Trump, this means that most Senate Republicans will all but certainly do the same. But Pelosi should do all she can to force every Senate Republican to go on record on this matter.
Trump plainly believes declaring a national emergency will make him look like he’s acting decisively and taking control of events in the eyes of his base. But peel back the layers, and it’s clear that he’ll still face many obstacles.
First, there will be court challenges to the national emergency itself, and as Elizabeth Goetein has shown, the mere fact that Trump has delayed so long will undermine his legal argument, because it undercuts the notion that there actually is an emergency (which there isn’t).Trump’s hesitation “belies his claim that there is an emergency at the border,” Goetein writes. “Presidents don’t dawdle in the face of real emergencies.” Now look again at the timeline I laid out above: Trump has “dawdled” for well over a month.
What’s more, by agreeing to allow conference negotiations to proceed to a deal, Trump may have further undermined his political and possibly his legal case. The more times Congress “votes against providing the funding the president has asked for,” Goetein notes, “the clearer it becomes that an emergency declaration in this case would be designed as an end run around the Constitution.” Now it will come after a bipartisan conference committee denied Trump his wall funding, and after Congress passed that funding, which is still expected.
On top of that, even if Trump does prevail in the courts, he will then face still more litigation from landowners, as Charlie Savage recently detailed. One expert told Savage that all these legal battles won’t be resolved until 2020 at the earliest, and if Trump loses reelection, a new Democratic president can halt the project before it really starts.
And even if he were to win on all those fronts, it’s still not clear how much money Trump could round up. It’s likely that all that would result is some more of the same bollard fencing that’s been built for years, in targeted areas, since that’s what Customs and Border Protection has declared is their preferred form of barrier. It’s simply amazing that Trump is willing to put the country through all of this just for that rinky-dink outcome, which won’t look anything like his wall even if it does happen, solely because he worries about how his base perceives him.
This must embolden Democrats
And on that score, if Trump does go through with this, taking to new levels his bad faith, lying, and seething contempt for our institutions and for his own institutional obligations to genuinely act in the national interest, it will become harder for House Democrats to adopt a cautious approach to things like getting Trump’s tax returns. The Democratic base and activist groups will renew the pressure on lawmakers to move on that, and they’ll have a pretty good argument, too, given that Trump’s degradations are escalating.
In the background is the fact that, with the House under Democratic control, Trump is facing mounting investigations into his corruption and misconduct, even as Special Robert S. Mueller III’s probe appears to be advancing into late stages. The walls of accountability are closing in, which means he needs (or thinks he needs) his wall more than ever to keep his base energized behind him as the going gets tougher.
Yet the reality that he won’t realize his wall is becoming too overwhelmingly obvious to make disappear in his usual fog of bluster and lies. And as Trump’s misconduct mounts, this time in service of the wall that will never happen, it will only make the wheels of accountability turn faster, and the reckoning grow nearer.
There is no emergency by any reasonable standards. There is no invasion as Trump has said, there is no harm to our economy and in fact keeping illegal aliens out of the labor force actually has a negative impact on employers have come to rely on them for low cost labor, jobs that U.S. citizens for the most part don’t want, especially at those low wages. Illegal aliens have a lower rate of crime than do others, such as U.S. citizens. Yes, there are examples where illegals have committed crimes but those are well below the national average.
Trump is the emergency we need to protect ourselves from.
". . . those who claim to know the Mind of God, who will tell you what God thinks and how He will judge and condemn others—those people are the greatest of all blasphemers." Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast
February 15, 2019 at 03:01 #10576Jean
ParticipantThe American Constitution gives astonishing sweeping power to the President. A national emergency is anything a president says it is. The Founding Fathers even allows a president to bypass the congressional power of the purse by using money appropriated by Congress for other purposes to fund whatever the President wants as long as it is to be spent on what the national emergency happens to be at any given time. The framers of the Constitution did imagine a president might need to be checked from irresponsible use of all this power which is why Congress is allowed to be a co-equal branch of government but they did not anticipate political parties whereby Congress would allow a president who is head of the majority party in Congress to have a free ride and expect unconditional support for any action he or she proposes. The party system whereby the president is supreme Leader has undermined the intention (not the letter) of the Constitution. Senate Republicans will allow minority president Donald Trump to fund his big beautiful concrete wall after all.
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