A Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded by Trump/Pence

The Trump/Pence regime reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has been all over the board, ranging from some level of glee that China's economy was being hit hard by the virus, to claiming it was a hoax, to claiming that it had been "controlled" and, of course, claiming there was no way to know of the consequences of such an outbreak.  The last claim is utterly untrue because (i) the Obama administration had warned of the danger of a pandemic and (ii) the Trump/Pence regime ran its own "war game" of sorts just last year using a pandemic eerily similar to that striking the nation.  The exercise showed serious deficiencies in America's preparedness and the resulting report was marked "do not distribute" and little was done to address the severe weaknesses laid out in the report.  All of this is important and cannot be allowed to swept under the rug or lied about by the Trump/Pence regime which needs to be held accountable.  A long article in the New York Times looks at what was known and what was not done. Indeed, Trump's 2021 budget proposes huge cuts to the funding for the Center for Disease Control. Would that protecting the health and safety of Americans had received even a fraction of that Trump has directed to building his ridiculous border wall.  Here are article highlights:

The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.

Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.

The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.

“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference. In fact, they had.

Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.

The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.

What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.

But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.

After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak. . . . . But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.

[I]n testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.

On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.

The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed. . . . . But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.

Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.

These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear.

 Although not mentioned in the article, another problem is that so many of Trump's appointees are not competent to run their agencies and were appointed because they adhered to Trump's ideology.  Appointments based on actual knowledge, skills and expertise might have made a difference.  It is imperative that Trump and Pence be held accountable for their failings.

Federal Court Blocks Trump Plan to Spend Military Funds on Border Wall

Those of us who took "government" and "civics" courses in high school - back in the "olden days" in the view of some - learned that Congress enacts the laws and authorizes federal government spending and that the president and the rest of the executive branch are tasked with implementing those laws and implementing the spending enacted by Congress. Apparently, either Der Trumpenführer missed out on those classes or, more likely, he views himself as above the law - a monarch, perhaps.  El Paso County in Texas sued to block Trumps effort to divert $3.6 billion in funding allocated by Congress for military construction and projects to build his ridiculous wall (which where constructed is being regularly shown to to not be able to keep refugees out).  Today, a federal court - the other co-equal branch of the federal government - ruled the action was illegal and granted a permanent injunction to block the misapplication of the Congress' allocated funds.   The racist Trump/Pence regime will likely appeal, but the higher courts ought to affirm the district court ruling if they apply the law and do not improperly play politics. The Washington Post has details:

A federal judge in El Paso on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration’s plan to pay for border barrier construction with $3.6 billion in military funds, ruling that the administration does not have the authority to divert money appropriated by Congress for a different purpose.

The Trump administration was planning to use those funds to build 175 miles of steel barriers, and the court’s permanent injunction is a setback for Trump’s pledge to erect 450 linear miles of fencing by the end of next year.

District Court Judge David Briones, a Bill Clinton appointee, said in his ruling that the administration’s attempt to reprogram military construction funds by emergency proclamation was unlawful and that the plaintiffs in the case were entitled to a permanent injunction halting the government.

[T]he ruling affects roughly one-third of the money the president plans to spend on his signature project. Briones’s decision does not apply to other money available to the administration, including reprogrammed military counternarcotics funds.

The ruling marked the first instance of a local jurisdiction successfully suing to block construction of Trump’s border barrier.

El Paso County, one of the two plaintiffs in the suit, had argued that the new barrier was unwanted by the community and would inflict permanent harm on its reputation as a welcoming, cross-border place.

Kristy Parker, an attorney with the nonprofit group Protect Democracy who represented the plaintiffs, said the decision means [Trump] the president cannot spend money on the project that wasn’t authorized by Congress.

“The president can’t use the National Emergencies Act to override a congressional appropriations decision,” Parker said. “That specifically means he cannot use funds appropriated for military construction and divert it for use to build border barriers.”

Kudos to the federal judge.

Trump's Theft of Military Funding Harms Military Families

Norfolk Naval Base.

Living in southeast Virginia, the military is a constant presence.  So to are military members and their families who are both friends, neighbors and clients.  They are not props for some ego boosting reality show that exists in Donald Trump's mind.  Yet, these dedicated military members are being compromised by Trump's raiding of military funding to build his ridiculous border wall that serves no purpose other than to fire up his racist, xenophobic base. Yesterday was the anniversary of 9-11, yet true to form, Trump turned it into all about himself, putting his mental disorders yet again on open display.  A column in Newsweek looks at this theft of funds previously allocated by Congress - the branch of government that holds the power of the purse - to fund a boondoggle that merely stokes Trump never satisfied ego and thrills only the ugliest elements of his base who might as well dress in KKK garb on a daily basis. Meanwhile, military families and projects are thrown under the bus.  Here are column excerpts:

As a young man, Donald Trump actively avoided military duty, seeking five draft deferments. But now, as commander in chief, he says that "I'm making up for it rapidly because we're rebuilding our military at a level that it's never seen before." So why is this chicken hawk president stealing $3.6 billion from the U.S. military construction budget?

Trump is asking service members and their families to suffer so he can pay for a wall on our southwest border, a costly and wasteful project that is nothing more than a xenophobic vanity project. . . . . Here are just a few examples of the 127 projects that will be put on hold.

In Virginia, two hazardous materials warehouses built in the World War II era will continue storing harmful materials in "structures that do not meet current life safety/fire safety requirements."

In Kentucky, children of military families will continue attending an overcrowded middle school at Fort Campbell because planned renovations no longer have funding. Shamefully, schools for service members' families take one of the biggest hits in Trump's plan.

In Florida, Tyndall Air Force Base—which only recently got supplemental disaster funds to recover from Hurricane Michael due to repeated Republican delays—will lose funding for a fire and crash rescue station.

From West Point to Pearl Harbor, soldiers in nearly two dozen states will sacrifice projects like fire houses, flight simulation facilities, roads, clinics and dining halls. Similar projects will be postponed at U.S. bases around the globe.

These are construction projects that military leaders asked Congress to fund. Each one was reviewed, prioritized and weighed carefully against fiscal restraints and operational necessity.

Conversely, Trump's wall is a hastily considered response to a campaign applause line. Remember, Mexico, not our military and their families, was the one that was supposed to pay for this wall.

And make no mistake: This [Trumpian] presidential theft of appropriated funds would violate Congress's power of the purse. It is, simply, unconstitutional.

Worse, these cuts put our service members in danger. They degrade the quality of life and morale for them and their families. Just last year, the Pentagon rated more than 30 percent of its infrastructure worldwide as poor or failing. Thanks to Trump, that number will surely climb.

Ultimately, these Trump cuts impede our military readiness and threaten our national security—and all for a project that has repeatedly been rejected by Congress on a bipartisan basis.

Many national security experts agree that such an edifice would be ineffective. Its construction price tag has been both elusive and massive, yet, some argue, it is sure to run over any current estimates.

There are also bound to be enormous unanticipated costs to this physical representation of bigotry and nativism—from forcibly and possibly illegally seizing land, to the environmental cost of disturbing protected land and threatening endangered species. It's possible the United States would have to cede land to Mexico.

[Trump] is not only exhibiting a horrific level of disrespect for our military; he is also asking them to make additional sacrifices—not for our country, but to satiate his own ego. . . . To him, stealing money from our military is just another ratings-generating plot line: like shutting down the government or caging children at the border. As our neighbors and communities suffer the consequences, Trump tweets, lies and moves on to the next harmful policy decision that keeps him in the spotlight.

[Trump] The president would do well to remember that Americans are not characters. Americans are real people. Real people who experience the real impacts of his impetuous decisions. Real service members who will work in unsafe conditions, or keep their kids in overcrowded schools or worry about the failure of mission-critical equipment. Our military deserves better. And our country deserves better.

Republicans Pressure Trump to Rescind National Emergency Declaration

His summit with Kim Jong-Un collapsed, he's taking heat for giving Kim a pass on the murder of American college student Otto Warmbier by Kim's thugs, Michael Cohen's testimony has dominated the news cycles, two of his children will be summoned for questioning before congressional committees and now Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer,  is facing a possible revolt of Senate Republicans against his fake national emergency declaration aimed solely at pleasing the worse knuckle dragging, racist elements of his base.  If it were anyone other than Trump, I might feel a very tiny ounce of sympathy, but since its Trump, the foulest individual to every occupy the White House, instead, it's almost reason enough for some champagne.  A piece in Politico looks at Senate Republican efforts to convince Trump to rescind his ridiculous declaration which could set a precedent that would allow future Democrat presidents to use similar ploys.  Here are excerpts:

Senate Republicans are offering a choice to President Donald Trump: Withdraw your national emergency declaration at the border or face a potential rebellion from the GOP.

The message was delivered clearly on Thursday by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), part of an effort by senior Republicans to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump on the Senate floor.

In a much-anticipated floor speech, the retiring senator declined to state whether he will become the deciding vote to block the president’s maneuver. But he signaled broad opposition to the emergency declaration and sought to convince Trump that he has other ways to collect $5.7 billion for the border wall — the precise amount of money he demanded during the government shutdown fight.

“He’s got sufficient funding without a national emergency, he can build a wall and avoid a dangerous precedent,” Alexander told reporters afterward, referring to billions from a drug forfeiture fund and anti-drug smuggling money at the Defense Department. “That would change the voting situation if he we were to agree to do that.”

Three Republicans have already said they would join Democrats in voting for a resolution to block Trump, and only one more is needed for the Senate to successfully reject Trump’s declaration. Alexander is just one of about 10 senators who are committed to blocking [Trump's] the president’s move or are considering doing so, suggesting the White House has a ways to go to avoid a public split in the party and a Trump veto. [Trump] The president can get way more money than he’s even asking for without setting the Constitution on its head,” said this undecided senator, who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “I am very, very skeptical about the precedent this makes.” If Trump doesn’t back down, there is still deep reluctance in the GOP to becoming the 51st vote for the disapproval resolution that the Senate is expected to vote on in March. So far, Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine are the only Republicans who have said they would support blocking Trump on his plans to seize billions from military projects. Despite his clear opposition to Trump’s national emergency declaration, Alexander deemed the looming vote on disapproval a hypothetical, since Trump could withdraw it or the House-passed resolution could be amended. Under current law, the House measure will come up by mid-March, and Alexander left little doubt that he’s just one of a large bloc of Republicans who could defy the president.

Trump’s national emergency declaration for border wall funding is “unnecessary, unwise and inconsistent with the Constitution,” Alexander told reporters. “And many Republican senators who can speak for themselves share that view.”

“We’ve never had a case where the president has asked for money, been refused the money by Congress, then used the national emergency powers to spend it anyway,” he added. “To me that’s a dangerous precedent.”

Trump's Phony National Emergency

Trump and Goebbels want to be, Stephen Miller.

Two pieces in the Washington Post look at Trump's phony national emergency declaration.  One looks at Chris Wallace of Fox News confronting Stephen Miller - Trump's equivalent to Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels - and the other looks at Trump's own and his administration's undermining of Trump's own declaration.   Both ultimately look at the non-existent emergency at the US/Mexico border. As prior posts have indicated, the only emergency is a political one as Trump faces disappointing his virulently racist base.  First the piece that looks at Wallace's take down of Miller:

Unstoppable rhetoric collided with immovable facts on “Fox News Sunday,” as White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller defended President Trump’s national emergency declaration and invoked the potential for a veto if Congress disapproves in an interview with Chris Wallace.

Miller described an onslaught of drugs and migrants flowing over the border as justification for the emergency declaration.

Yet, like a small army of fact-checkers have noted before, Wallace told Miller the vast majority of hard drugs seized by Customs and Border Protection are captured at points of entry, not between them, and unlawful migration over the border has fallen 90 percent since 2000.

So what crisis is the wall supposed to solve? In shades of former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” theory, Miller invoked what could not be demonstrated by his own administration’s statistics. The segment took a tense turn after Wallace pressed Miller, a self-proclaimed constitutional conservative, over measures designed to block the president from obtaining funds outside Congress.

[T]he move lacks precedent, Wallace said, in how Trump has sought to secure his funds. Miller repeatedly refused to acknowledge it has not happened before and tried to fire back with a question of his own.

Wallace sailed past the dodge. “Then answer my question, can you name one case where a president has asked Congress for money, Congress has refused, and the president has then invoked national powers to get the money anyway?”

[Miller] suggested that if Congress passes a resolution disapproving of the emergency, Trump would probably veto it. “He’s going to protect his national emergency declaration, guaranteed. … If the [Trump] president can’t defend this country, then he cannot fulfill this constitutional oath of office.”

The second piece is a column by former Republican Jennifer Rubin, a vocal Trump critic, who lists out how Trump's own actions underscore the lie that a national emergency exists.  Here are excerpts:

None other than Ann Coulter declared on Friday, “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.” She has a point. The president’s declaration, in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), amounts to “a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process.”

Even the best-executed power grab would have been difficult to defend in court. . . . . Nevertheless, in 10 steps, Trump irretrievably ruined whatever legal case he would have had.

First, he did not address the issue when the Republican Party held majorities in both the House and Senate, when, for example, he had the ability to push through measures on reconciliation.

Second, he rejected a deal for $25 billion in border security in exchange for legalization of “dreamers,” which doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d do in a real emergency.

Third, he signed a continuing resolution that kept the government running until Dec. 8, 2018. Again, you wouldn’t agree to that in the face of a real emergency.

Fourth, Congress passed another continuing resolution to keep the government open until Dec. 21, 2018.

Fifth, the president provoked a 35-day shutdown that ended with a three-week continuing resolution. Again, this doesn’t give off an emergency “vibe.”

Sixth, as appropriators negotiate, the president repeatedly threatens to us emergency powers until Congress gives him what he wants. The critical precondition for an emergency declaration is lack of congressional compliance.

Seventh, appropriators reach agreement — and Trump signs it.
 Eighth, there is no report or analysis demonstrating why Congress’s response is inadequate. Instead, Trump declares an emergency on the same day as the signing, a transparent effort to eclipse his utter failure to deliver on a campaign promise.
 Ninth, at a bizarre Rose Garden press conference on Friday, Trump declared, “I didn’t need to do this. . . . I just want to do it faster.” It is difficult to imagine a more damaging confession that the emergency is figment of Trump’s frail ego and thirst to avoid disappointing his base.

Tenth, Trump tells a set of ridiculous lies to justify his border wall. . . . Trump’s irrational, desperate and incoherent approach has not merely damaged his chances of surviving a court challenge. He has made it infinitely harder for Republicans to defend him and vote against a resolution reversing the declaration. Trump told them there was no emergency.

Why People Talk About Invoking the 25th Amendment

Watch Donald Trump's bizarre press conference declaring a bogus national emergency on the US/Mexico border and then watch old news reel footage of Hitler's unhinged ranting or Mussolini posturing and suddenly one realizes what the 25th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution. We have a mentally deranged individual in the White House which is the real national emergency facing the nation.  Everything else pales in comparison (national Democrats worried about ancient black face photos in Virginia need a serious reality check).  We face a clear and present danger that needs to be addressed immediately.

As for Trump's still loyal supporters, they are really no better than the ugliest elements of Hitler's base who were motivated by anti-Semiticism, hatred and bigotry, or greed over the money they thought they could make.  I truly do not know how otherwise sane Republicans cannot feel alarm as Trump increasingly shows he is not tethered to objective reality.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the bizarre spectacle that took place in the White House rose garden.  Here are highlights:  

There was no sign of alarm as administration officials and journalists assembled Friday in the Rose Garden under a perfect blue sky amid unseasonable warmth. Nor was there any sense of crisis conveyed by President Trump, scheduled to fly to his Mar-a-Lago resort later Friday.

His topic demanded utmost solemnity: The situation on the border is so dire, such a crisis, that he must invoke emergency powers to circumvent Congress, testing the boundary between constitutional democracy and autocracy. But with the nation watching, Trump instead delivered a bizarre, 47-minute variant of his campaign speech.

He boasted about the economy, military spending and the stock markets (“we have all the records”), and he applauded the Chinese president’s pledge to execute people who deal fentanyl (“one of the things I’m most excited about in our trade deal”). He said Japan’s prime minister had nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. He declared Ann Coulter “off the reservation” but praised his favorite Fox News hosts and celebrated Rush Limbaugh’s endurance . . . .

[H]e declared the “eradication of the caliphate” in Syria (his top general in the region begs to differ). He introduced his new attorney general, disparaged the Democrats’ “con game,” criticized retired House speaker Paul Ryan, invoked campaign promises, recited the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan and pronounced his reelection prospects excellent. He pinged from regulations to Britain to MS-13 to “monstrous caravans” to an apocryphal story about women gagged with duct tape.

Oh, and he also mentioned his emergency declaration — specifically, that it isn’t necessary. “I didn’t need to do this,” he said in response to a question from NBC’s Peter Alexander. It’s just that the emergency declaration lets him build a border wall “faster.” He acknowledged that “I don’t know what to do with all the money” . . . Somewhere, administration lawyers were face-palming.

On Thursday came reports that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe had confirmed that Justice Department officials discussed the possibility of removing Trump under the 25th Amendment for incapacity. The president then spent the next 30 hours showing exactly why some people think him incapacitated.

Prayers and frantic reassurance: This is how Republicans deal with an erratic president determined to defy an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress, take money from the military (the Pentagon’s uses for it “didn’t sound too important to me,” Trump said) and set a precedent for future presidents to declare emergencies for their pet projects.

When President Barack Obama attempted a less aggressive use of executive power in 2014, Republicans denounced him as a “tyrant” and “dictator,” . . . Trump seemed not to have heard such warnings as he ricocheted from topic to topic in the Rose Garden. He carried a speech to the lectern but mostly ignored it as he spun fantasies.

Evidence that most of the illegal drugs pass through legal border crossings? “It’s all a lie.”  CNN’s Jim Acosta pointed out that border crossings are near record lows and illegal immigrants are not disproportionately criminal.  “You’re fake news,” Trump replied.

Playboy’s Brian Karem asked Trump to “clarify where you get your numbers.” “Sit down,” Trump told him, declaring that “I use many stats.” Minutes later, he pumped a fist in the air and departed.

“What about the 25th Amendment?” Acosta called after him. Trump’s performance had already provided a compelling answer.

Trump is not mentally well - and neither are those who continue to support him (e.g., evangelical Christians) and/or make endless apologies. 

Trump Shocks GOP with Bogus Emergency Declaration

Much of Trump's core base is motivated by one thing: a seething hatred of anyone non-white.  And this hatred extends to the Christofascists as evidenced by hate group leader Tony Perkins who heads the Family Research Council, formerly an affiliate of The Family Foundation here on Virginia. Perkins told his lemming like followers to "ask God for Trump’s wall to protect America from “thieves, murderers, and invaders”." Statement such as this underscore why Trump will cite a bogus national emergency to use funds not appropriated by Congress as required by the U.S. Constitution to build his farcical wall that serves no purpose in most instances other than to satiate the racial hatred of his base.  If Virginia Democrats busy wringing their hands over issues of race are truly concerned, they need to move to stop Trump's batshitery.  Fortunately some Senate Republicans seem hesitant to support Trump's lie which may be blocked by the courts as the Department of Justice has already warned Trump.  Of course, the real national emergency is that Trump still occupies the White House.  A piece in Politico looks at the GOP unease as Trump seeks to thrill the ugliest elements of his base.  Here are highlights:

The surprise announcement Thursday that President Donald Trump will use his emergency powers to try and build his border wall blindsided some Republicans, confused others and sent the Senate GOP into a general state of shock.

The news, delivered by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor, came after weeks of warnings from his own party not to declare a national emergency at the border.

Trump has decided to challenge Republicans’ resolve anyway — but he may not like the outcome. Aides privately predicted Trump will lose a vote on the Senate floor once the Democratic House passes a resolution of disapproval to block the move.

“I wish he wouldn’t have done it,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who McConnell interrupted on the Senate floor to make his announcement. “If [Trump] figures that Congress didn’t do enough and he’s got to do it, then I imagine we’ll find out whether he’s got the authority to do it by the courts.”

“In general, I’m not for running the government by emergency, nor spending money. The Constitution's pretty clear: spending originates and is directed by Congress,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who like almost everyone else on Capitol Hill wants more information. “So I’m not really for it.”

Others were blunter.

"It’s a mistake on [Trump's] the president’s part," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). "I also believe that it will be challenged in court. It undermines the role of Congress and the appropriations process.”

The question is not simply a theoretical one. Republicans might have to go on record on the Senate floor in the coming days over the matter. Under congressional rules, the Senate would be forced to act on a resolution of disapproval passed by the House, and just four Republicans would need to join with 47 Democrats to rebuke the president at the simple majority threshold. [A] battle over Trump’s executive powers will draw attention to the Senate GOP's on-again, off-again rift with the president over his hard-line immigration positions. And a veto override vote against their own president is not what Republicans want to be dealing with as the 2020 campaign begins.

Some Republicans breathed a sigh of relief that Trump’s unilateral move would at least end, for now, a wall fight that sparked a 35-day partial shutdown and threatened another.
But the move also represents a blow to any GOP effort to work on immigration reform while Trump is president.

“I always kind of take pause to the assertion of executive power,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “The main reason is it could detract attention away from the long-term solution that can only occur through an act of Congress.”

The Second Coming of Nancy Pelosi

Rather than conducting a witch hunt against Ralph Northam which I predict will leave the Virginia Democrat Party deeply divided and unable to win control of the Virginia General Assembly - I already know I will not be voting for my state senator and delegate and may even decide challenge one of them - a piece in The Atlantic looks at Nancy Pelosi and what ought to be Democrats' sole focus of attention: reining in and, hopefully, dispatching Donald Trump. Unlike the civil war within the party in Virginia, this policy could rally all Virginia Democrats come November and in 2020.  Here are article highlights:

Perhaps it’s because as a child she practiced her penmanship by logging the favors owed to and from her powerful politician father in a record book so they’d never get lost. Perhaps it’s because she gave birth to five children in six years. Perhaps it’s because she first ran for public office at age 47, when her youngest kid was a senior in high school and she knew herself, and her mind, and what she had to offer. Perhaps it’s because she never gives up. 

Whatever the reasons, Nancy Patricia D’Alesandro Pelosi has clearly not only reemerged as what she already was more than a decade ago—the highest-ranking woman in the history of the republic, as speaker of the House—but as the single Washington leader best able to frustrate, sidestep, stymie, outfox, infuriate, and when it suits her purposes, simply ignore Donald Trump. “She’ll cut your head off and you won’t even know you’re bleeding,” her filmmaker daughter Alexandra told CNN last month, describing her mother’s negotiating style. “That’s all you need to know about her. No one ever won betting against Nancy Pelosi. She’s persevered.” No kidding.

That analysis could just as easily apply to her deft handling of the restive young Democrats, who just two months ago were grumbling that her day had passed and were all but openly wondering how they might block her from becoming speaker again. Now she’s the unquestioned heroine of the anti-Trump left, on par with the iconic Ruth Bader Ginsburg and rapidly climbing to the level of Eleanor Roosevelt, if not Joan of Arc.

Pelosi’s own public response to her reversal of fortune has been understated, but sly.  . . . . Pelosi co-opted the crop of insurgent Democratic freshmen who might have threatened her rule in part by pledging to serve only four years as speaker, but also by listening to their concerns and hearing them out, and addressing them. She has a healthy sense of her own status, but doesn’t let her ego get in the way of the task at hand.

“She knows how to count votes better than anybody,” says former Representative Tom Downey of New York, who grew close to her after she first came to Congress from San Francisco in a special election in 1987, two years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born. “She’s perfectly politically centered to lead the new dynamic members of Congress, because she was once one of them. She gave her first speech on AIDS when she got to the Congress. She’s really absolutely the perfect person for this moment.”

Not coincidentally, her face-offs with Trump have solidified and consolidated her power over her own caucus. . . . She won it because she stood up to him [Trump].” McCarthy added bluntly, “She wants to break him.”

“It goes to show you,” she reportedly told a closed-door meeting of Democrats after her December confrontation in the Oval Office. “You get into a tinkle contest with a skunk, you get tinkle all over you.” The Washington Post reported that she added, “It’s like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.” Still later, she mocked Trump’s ever-shifting definition of his proposed border wall, telling USA Today, “He’s already backed off the cement—now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.”

Pelosi uses [Trump’s] the president’s most inflammatory statements as a mere foil to talk about whatever she wants to talk about.

Pelosi’s strategy is bearing fruit. The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows that voters trust her over Trump, by a margin of 49 to 42 percent, with women trusting her even more: 54 to 37 percent. . . . . And voters overall trust congressional Democrats more than Trump on the issue of border security, by 50 to 41 percent.

“She holds some grudges, as you have to in politics,” Tom Downey says, “but she’s not consumed with it, and it’s not a big part of her plan. Trump’s a silly man, and she knows it. He’s not going to be a problem for her.”

The burgundy pantsuit that Pelosi wore when she was sworn in as speaker the first time in 2007 is already in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Curators had better be on the lookout for the iconic item of apparel or personal effects that could symbolize her second tour. She’s already well on her way to earning the honor.

Pelosi and Shumer Have Only Just Begun Reining in Trump’

For most of his life, Donald Trump has lead a life where he has escaped consequences. Born to wealth, he escaped service in the Vietnam War by his father's buying of a medical excuse to win him a deferment.  Throughout his business career, he has used bankruptcy to ditch failed ventures and let the pain fall on others - others he typical failed to pay. When banks ceased loaning him money, he seems to have found Deutsche Bank's apparent Russian money laundering operation to keep his business going when he wasn't selling properties to Russian oligarchs in his own money laundering gambit.  Then in his first two years in the White House he had emasculated Republicans only too happy to engage in political fellatio so as to avoid primary challenges from Trump's unwashed, hate-filled base of support.  Now, the game has changed with the shift of control of the House of Representatives to Democrat control.  This, combined with a majority of Americans opposing Trump and his agenda, means Trump's in for a continuing shock.  A piece in The Daily Beast suggests that Trump had best brace himself for numerous political spankings.  Here are article excerpts:

So, having won round one so resoundingly, what should the Democrats do next about the wall?

One thing: Remember that this is Donald Trump’s problem. And Mitch McConnell’s, and Kevin McCarthy’s (who? The House minority leader). They’re the ones who are trying to push a minority position down the country’s throat. [Trump] The president in particular, of course. But majorities of Americans are against the wall and always have been. So let Trump turn that around, if he can.

It’s worth chortling again for a few paragraphs over how ridiculous and weak they made Trump look. Remember, this is a man who spent years, going way back before he started campaigning in 2015, saying over and over and over how easy being president would be. Bring the Chinese to heel? Very easy. Make Middle East peace? Please. Get Mexico to pay for the wall? Piece of cake. He’s been saying these things in books and television appearances for years.

I can’t imagine who believed him—and if anyone out there was a big enough idiot to do so, that’s their problem. But the point is that he believed it. . . . . But in January, he met reality.

Nancy Pelosi took him to the cleaners, and she deserves enormous credit. Her State of the Union gambit was just inspired. The awesome tell at the way she discombobulated Trump was that he couldn’t even come up with a nickname for her. Did you see that? “Nancy Pelosi, or Nancy, as I call her…” Wow, Don, good one! Her first name!

Taking nothing away from her, though, it wasn’t all Pelosi. Chuck Schumer was the one who goaded Trump into accepting responsibility for the shutdown at that Dec. 11 meeting.

And it was right after those [Senate votes last week] votes that McConnell called Chuck Schumer into his office. McConnell wanted Schumer to agree to a down payment on the wall. Schumer said no and counter-offered a continuing resolution and put together a conference committee to negotiate this. And this is exactly what’s happening.

I’ve followed this stuff closely for many years, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve complained about the Democrats wilting during some congressional confrontation, not staying unified, and getting their hats handed to them by Republicans. Well—no more. The Democrats can play hardball now. They did it already on health care and tax reform, when they didn’t lose a single vote. And there’s no reason they shouldn’t do more of it going forward, on the upcoming debt ceiling fight, on budget stuff, and in the House on investigations and subpoenas of every kind. They have the leverage now to deny Trump a win on anything.

So this week, this conference committee that Schumer suggested will start their talks. The Democratic conferees are Richard Durbin, Pat Leahy, and Jon Tester from the Senate; and from the House, a sextet led by Nita Lowey of upstate New York. They’re mostly pretty senior, and the only lefty in the bunch is Barbara Lee of Oakland. The Senate Republicans are led by Richard Shelby of Alabama, who’s plenty conservative but not really a MAGA fire-breather.

[T]hey might find a way to cut a deal. And maybe the Democrats should cut one—if  and only if they get just massive concessions on Dreamers and temporary protected status people and whatever else.

But what they absolutely should not do in this case is make a deal for the sake of seeming like reasonable people. Healthy majorities of Americans are against the wall and think it’s basically pointless or won’t do the job Trump swears it will do. So the position they’re representing right now—no wall—is the reasonable position. They don’t need to budge an inch from that.

Trump already told The Wall Street Journal that he'll shut the government down again and considers a deal to be less than a 50-50 shot. He has probably persuaded everyone he’s going to persuade by now. He can buy all the duct tape from here to Laredo and it still won’t change things. And if it comes to him declaring his emergency powers, then so be it. That will be really popular.

Easy? His life has been easy. Life tends to be that way when you start it with $300 million. But he lived his whole life in a bubble of no consequences. Those days are gone. He owes consequences a very large bill indeed, and on a number of fronts, it’s about to come due.

Are Cracks Showing in Trump's Toxic Base?

As I suspect a majority of Americans bask in the glow of having seen Trump go down to defeat on his idiotic border wall stunt and government shutdown, some polls suggest there is even more reason to smile: cracks seem to have developed in some of Trump's base.  It's not that his base has relaxed its anti-immigrant hatred but rather that some have perhaps finally realized that Trump is a buffoon and that they have been played. The only cause Trump believes in is him self and satiating is unquenchable ego.  Nothing and no one else matters.  And now, those played for fools are perhaps belatedly realizing they were played from the beginning.  Yes, Trump is a racist and homophobe, but his calls for open racism and attacks on the LGBT community have been aimed at playing those best motivated by hatred of others, not due to any sincere belief or principles.  A column in The Atlantic looks at perhaps telltale cracks in Trump's base of support.  Here are excerpts:

On Friday, President Donald Trump announced a deal with Democrats to reopen the government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history. The deal was a concession to reality: Trump was not winning the battle over the shutdown in public opinion, he had not persuaded Democrats to fund the wall he wanted, and he had no plan to change that.

The unfavorable polling is not news. Since the early days of the shutdown, more Americans have blamed Trump than Democrats for the government’s closure, which is not altogether surprising since, in December, the president preemptively claimed responsibility. But over the past week, there have been signs that the shutdown has hurt Trump even with his base supporters . . .

In a CBS poll, seven in 10 voters said a border wall was not worth the shutdown, and respondents rated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of negotiations higher than Trump’s, 47–35. An Associated Press/NORC poll found that 60 percent held Trump responsible for the shutdown, versus 31 percent who blamed Democrats. For months, Trump’s overall approval rating has been an object of fascination for pundits. . . . Almost nothing—not the steady drumbeat of damning news on the Russia investigation, not the chaos of the White House, and neither a strong economy nor a volatile stock market—seemed able to dislodge it. The American people had apparently made up their minds about Trump, and the four in 10 who approved weren’t going to change their minds, come hell or high water.

Yet the shutdown seems to have broken that equilibrium. Trump hit his highest disapproval on record in the Morning Consult poll, at 57 percent. CBS found 59 percent disapproval. In the AP-NORC poll, Trump’s approval tanked from 42 percent a month ago to 34 percent.

What’s interesting is not just that the approval rate is finally budging, but why—and with whom. Trump has long been happy to withstand the opprobrium of the press, elites, and much of the country. . . . As my colleague Ron Brownstein has demonstrated, [Trump] the president has opted for political tactics meant to shore up his base. Shutting down the government over the wall was a part of that philosophy. The administration concluded that the wall was such an important issue for his base that it was worth whatever political blowback that might come from other quarters to get it done. In practice, however, weakened standing among that base accounts for Trump’s slumping approval. The NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll finds that Trump’s approval is down among suburban men, white evangelicals, and men without a college degree, all key segments of his constituency.

In the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Trump’s disapproval increased among evangelicals, non-college-educated voters, and those who voted for Trump in 2016, compared with a poll in early January. Meanwhile, the number who blamed Trump for the shutdown increased (slightly) among all three groups. . . . They haven’t changed their minds about the need for the wall; they’re just losing their faith in Trump and are fed up with the shutdown.

Nevertheless, the slippage in backing even among Trump’s base since the start of the shutdown calls into question the wisdom of the president’s calculation that the wall was an effective pander to his core supporters. It’s not just that Trump’s belief that Democrats would cave was out of touch with reality—even more dangerously for him, he was out of touch with the base.

Trump’s Wall Retreat Bewilders His Racist Supporters

It's a relief to have the government shutdown over for now, especially since I have family members who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay. Beyond that, it is truly delicious to see the shocked reactions of Trump's MAGA hat wearing supporters (wearing a MAGA hat is today's equivalent of donning KKK robes) at his surrender to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat controlled House of Representatives. Making it even more delicious is the perception of Trump's angry male base is that Trump lost to a woman - a 78 year old grandmother no less. A piece in Politico looks at the shrieks and angst among Trump's racist, anti-immigrant base.  Note how one former aid describes Trump's surrender as watching a house burn down. Here are excerpts:

Before President Donald Trump finished speaking from the Rose Garden, putting a temporary end to the five-week government shutdown, a running group text between several of his former aides lit up with complaints.

“[Speaker Nancy] Pelosi ordered everything off the menu and left Trump hanging with the bill,” one Trump ally texted to the group.

“President Nancy Pelosi, she runs the country now,” said a former White House official. “We went from indefinite shutdown, to down payment, to cave — all within a span of 24 hours.”

That official said that Trump’s core supporters and former aides are “furious” and “melting down.”

[S]ome of his most loyal supporters fretted that Trump was in danger of losing his fervent base that has fueled his presidency. It didn’t help that special counsel Robert Mueller had just released more details about the Trump campaign’s alleged attempts to backchannel with WikiLeaks during the election.

It all left Trump staring at a tough road ahead. Having staked his nascent 2020 reelection messaging to the wall fight, Trump now can’t claim victory as Democrats start entering the field. After stumbling in his first bout with Pelosi, Trump must now face an invigorated Democratic-led House keen to investigate the White House. And following Mueller's reveal of more evidence that Trump’s 2016 team tried to furtively gather intel about hacked Democratic emails, Trump will have to fend off increasing calls for impeachment.

During the month-long shutdown, Trump’s approval ratings dropped to record lows, his much-touted economy lost steam because of the shutdown and conservative immigration activists rolled their eyes over the his wall fixation.

“FAA shutting airports is a losing card,” said a former Trump adviser who remains close to the White House. “He doesn’t care about federal workers. But pissing off travelers — watch out.”

“I’m not sure allies are going along with it, more just letting it happen. It’s like watching a house completely engulfed in flames; there’s nothing you can do except watch,” a former campaign aide told POLITICO when asked about the reaction from hard-line immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose president Dan Stein appeared to tepidly endorse Trump’s latest strategy.

Three former Trump aides disagreed with Stein’s assessment, claiming [Trump] the president raised a white flag on Friday and surrendered the already-limited leverage he had left. All three expressed dismay at the president’s strategy over the past 72 hours — from him submitting to Pelosi’s request to delay the State of the Union until the government reopened to endorsing a wall-less spending bill while congressional Democrats and Republicans hash things out.

The White House allies said their chief concern going forward is a situation in which Trump backpedals again if a deal isn’t struck in the coming weeks. The White House has left a national emergency declaration on the table, suggesting the president could still invoke executive authority to secure funding for a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attorneys in the White House counsel’s office have spent weeks reviewing the legality of such a move, parsing the various options, according to one Republican close to the White House.

“He’s going to cave again in [three] weeks,” predicted the former campaign official. “Democrats have Trump by the balls.”

Anything that makes Trump's and his supporters' day hell, warms my heart.

Trump's Hostage Attempt Is Going Miserably Wrong

Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, latest effort to cause Democrats to surrender to his narcissistic will has been to offer temporary relief to so-called Dreamers while seeking funding for his permanent wall - a wall that Chinese history tells us would be futile (for Fox News viewers, I'm referring to the spectacular failure of the Great Wall of China to keep invaders out).  The self described great negotiator can't negotiate himself out of a wet paper bag and seemingly is hell bent to put his incompetence and petulance on worldwide view.  Meanwhile real families and a growing number of businesses are feeling very real economic pain as Trump continues his temper tantrum.  A column in The Atlantic by long time conservative and former Republican David Frum predicts that Trump will have no choice but to surrender in the near term.  Even his support among his racist base is slipping.  Here are column excerpts:

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8. He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Having failed to convince the public, Trump is now trying Exit Two. This idea is even more harebrained than the last, if that is even possible. Instead of appealing in prime time to the whole nation, Trump on Saturday afternoon advanced a detailed set of proposals intended to shift a critical mass of backbench Democrats to break with their leadership and deal directly with him. You don’t need to do much more than articulate the idea out loud to appreciate its utter unrealism.

The Democratic majority is newly elected and highly cohesive. Why on earth would any appreciable number of Democrats break away from their leadership to do business as individuals with a president none of them trusts about an issue none of them thinks should be negotiable: reopening the government? They will not do it, and it should have been obviously predictable from the start that they would not do it. Trump could not even get moderate Democrats to come have lunch with him at the White House this week.

Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter will rant enjoyably about how mean it is for Democrats to reject Trump’s latest self-help scheme. That will be nice for the president to hear. But Fox News, and talk radio, and MAGA Twitter cannot protect him from the real-world consequences of the shutdown he forced. They cannot erase the video showing Trump proudly talking about how he would be the one to do it. They cannot sustain his poll numbers among the large majority of America that is non-Fox, non-MAGA.

The shutdown was a demand for unconditional surrender. Unfortunately for him, [Trump] the president lacks the political realism to recognize that he doesn’t have the clout to impose that surrender. He’s the one who will now have to climb down, and very soon, probably within days. The end of a hostage taking is not a surrender. But it will surely feel that way to the hostage taker—and deservedly, too.