Rejoice, Democrats. You should admit that President Donald Trump is your greatest ally who will enable you to accomplish left-wing goals that would never have been possible without him.
He has declared illegal immigration across the southern border to be a national emergency. An emergency that has been going on for over 100 years. An emergency that is clearly in defiance of Congress, to which the U.S. Constitution clearly ascribes the responsibility for how much and where money is spent.
So, if the Democrats can contain the crazies in their midst and elect a Democrat to the presidency then the Trump precedent opens the door to all kinds of emergencies. Mass shootings are an emergency; let’s start banning certain types of guns. Climate change is an emergency; let’s shut down all the factories that use coal, declare war on the internal combustion engine and the cars that use them. Paying for medical care is a national emergency; let’s have Medicare for all. Put U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal allies in charge of eliminating bovine flatulence.
Trump is not content to just cripple the Republican Party, he wants to give the Democrats the tools to wreck it completely.
For eight years I heard Republicans bitch, and rightly so, about President Obama’s executive orders that implemented rules and regulations not passed by Congress. Trump, to his credit, has been rolling some of them back. But now Trump supporters are cheering the president for scoring political points against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer by ignoring Congress. If you can put one over on Schumer and Pelosi, then who cares what’s in the Constitution or what precedent it might set?
There are some Republicans who cheer Trump’s actions while secretly hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will rule against his emergency scheme. One suspects that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is one of them. He said he supported Trump in order to avoid another government shutdown. Trump keeps painting himself into corner after corner. He was embarrassed by the outcome of the mid-term elections. He said he would shut down the government unless he got wall funding of almost $6 billion. The government re-opened and he didn’t get the money. Now he is going the national emergency route, which he himself has said will go to the Supreme Court and he may lose. By then he will be campaigning for re-election and the best he can tell his base is that “he tried.” So much for the vaunted deal-maker.
Trump’s re-election prospects do not look good. He has been able to drive the younger generation to the Democratic Party. He had narrow victories in the Midwest for his first term, but those areas voted for Democrats in the mid-terms. But Trump does have an ace in the hole. The Democratic Party is lurching to the left. The Democratic National Committee is headed by a left-winger. Rules changes mean primary winners will determine the nominee, the super delegates that helped Hillary Clinton stifle Bernie Sanders will not have a say this time around.
The Green New Deal, the greatest government power grab in the history of the country, has been endorsed by the frontrunners in the Democratic race to be the nominee. It is a program guaranteed to wreck the economy. That doesn’t seem to be a worry for socialists. Ocasio-Cortez led the cheers when Amazon killed plans for a headquarters in New York and took its 25,000 jobs elsewhere. The company would have gotten a free ride on local taxes to the tune of $3 billion. Demonstrating her total ignorance of economics, Ocasio-Cortez said New York should spend this mythical $3 billion on education and health care. There is no $3 billion and never was. It was the amount of future taxes Amazon would not have to pay in return for providing the economic boost of 25,000 jobs.
With leading Democratic candidates signing on to destroy capitalism and Trump deciding to rule by fiat, we are in a heap of trouble after the 2020 election.
Word of the month: Do cable TV hosts and Washington reporters go someplace each month to get the latest buzzword? You may have noticed that every other piece for the past two weeks had a reference to a “dumpster fire.” Everything that’s a mess. The Trump administration, the Cleveland bullpen, social media, the Anthony Davis trade – the list goes on and on. Last month everything was “fraught.” Robert Mueller’s case was “fraught” with complications. The immigration crisis is “fraught.” So and so’s presidential campaign is “fraught.”
Makes you wonder who decides these things. You don’t know how long it took us to get my parents’ generation to stop using “colored people” instead of black or African-American. Now someone has decided that you can’t be “woke” unless you use “people of color.” I’m sure there is a delicate nuance there that I just don’t get. Guess I’m not “woke,” which evidently means you are fully committed to being politically correct. (It’s a safe bet that the first “dumpster fire” occurred in Knoxville since local businessman George Dempster invented the dumpster.)
Speaking of words, there are some that irritate me no end. Rich guys call themselves, or are often called by others, a “servant leader.” I get a mental image of a butler leading his drunken master to bed at night. That can’t be right. But it’s hard for me to see millionaires who set the community agenda and decide whether you build a baseball stadium or a convention center as servants.