Random Thoughts on the Current Threat to the American Republic from Within

I’ve really been trying to avoid writing about politics lately, as it just enrages me to see the United States sunk into the bottomless abyss of stupidity, lawlessness, and immorality by its current administration – and even more so by the sycophantic support this administration gets from its base and from its partisan Quislings in Congress – but sometimes you just have to point a few things out for your own sanity.

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1. There is no national emergency.  Illegal immigration has been declining for decades.  There are no hordes of drug dealers racing across the unguarded borders.  Not a single Congressional Representative of either party whose district touches the border thinks this is a good idea, and a number of Texas sheriffs are on public record as saying it’s nonsense.  It is a vortex of stupidity, as one recent headline had it, and it only appeals to the ignorant and the foolish.  There is no emergency.  There is only panic at the thought of poor people entering the US and working for a better life.  That’s not an emergency – that’s what the United States is designed to do.

2. The wall will not stop illegal immigration.  It will not even slow it down.  It will only divert scarce resources away from real concerns, up to and including actual border security.

3. There are a lot of bad analogies to Nazis floating around these days, but declaring a fake emergency in order to grab executive power that the nation’s foundational document explicitly says doesn’t belong to the executive is literally how Hitler turned his government into a dictatorship.  If the GOP wants people to stop comparing them to Nazis they should stop doing the things the Nazis did.

4. This is a deeply dangerous assault on the US Constitution.  Article 1, Section 9, Paragraph 7 explicitly reserves the power of the purse to Congress and it does so for a reason.  The Founders feared tyranny more than any other form of governmental breakdown, and separating the power of the purse from the executive was one of the critical ways they sought to avoid a tyrant in the United States.  Der Sturmtrumper would have been taken out back and horsewhipped as a subversive by the Founding Fathers.

5. The fact that there are so many Americans who see nothing wrong with this is a damning indictment of American culture and politics.  You are what you do when it matters, and if you support tyranny then you don’t deserve liberty.

6. Can we all just agree that this wall is a rhetorical device and will never actually happen?  Even if everyone magically decided that it was the Best Idea Ever and allocated the nearly unlimited amount of money that will need to be spent to make it happen, the fact is that you’re talking about several hundred miles of largely unsurveyed and extremely varied land – most of it private property owned by Americans who will take you to court before they let you seize it out from under them (and whatever happened to the idea that conservatives are all about small government and the free market?  just asking...) – that will have to be analyzed, charted, and prepared before the first shovel can be dug into the earth.  Meanwhile any putative wall will have to be designed, bid out, and contracted – a process that will take years unless they’re so desperate to do this that they’ll put up the first thing that comes to mind only to watch it fall over in the first rainstorm.  This isn’t a wall.  It’s a ploy to keep the rabid base happy and frightened enough to support der Sturmtrumper as he edges closer and closer to legal collapse.

7. It’s astonishing how poorly der Sturmtrumper thought this through.  He could have had billions for this stupid idea if he had agreed to provide a path to citizenship for the Dreamers back in early 2018, but that would have meant Brown People In America and by god neither he nor his base could have that.  He could have had $1.6 billion for the wall in the bill that was overwhelmingly approved by both houses of Congress last December, but President Coulter objected so we got a month-long government shut down that proved once and for all what a lousy businessman der Sturmtrumper really is, since all Congress authorized for this cockamamie project after the shutdown is $1.3 billion, rather less than the original deal.  Now he’s left with this totalitarian power grab that will in all likelihood fail in the courts even before the clock runs out on it.

8. The fact that der Sturmtrumper openly admitted that he didn’t need to take this action DURING HIS PRESS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCING IT is going to be the lead in every lawsuit filed against this illegal, unconstitutional, immoral, and totalitarian action.  Seriously – this guy can’t even seize dictatorial power right.

9. Which doesn’t reduce the seriousness of the fundamental threat this action represents to the American republic.  This is our Reichstag Fire moment, folks.  How do you plan to respond?