Between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, most of the Republicans seem to have made a kind of peace with the inevitability of the president*'s behaving like a tinhorn. We should be accustomed to this by now. The president* is going to raid the military. He is going to raid drug interdiction money. He is going to take money appropriated for one purpose and finance his own dark visions. He is lost in his own nightmares, abandoned in his own bigotry. His mind is a writhing ball of snakes. And there is nobody there to stop him. As Starbuck said of Ahab, he is a madman begetting other madmen. His speech was incoherent in thought, contemptuous of intellect, insane with bloodlust, and completely detached from anything that would be recognizable as reality even in Bedlam. Centuries after we ran a mad king off these shores, we now have one of our own.
[...]
This is a direct assault by this president* on the Congress's Article I powers. Usually, presidents use these powers to do things like levy sanctions on countries that are slaughtering their own people. What this president* is trying to do is to redirect money already appropriated for a project that Congress already has declined to fund—the last time only a couple of days ago. That is purely a dictatorial action. It is an abuse of power. It cannot be allowed to stand.
The argument being made by some on both the left and the right that, OK, if he can do this, then the next Democratic president can declare a national emergency on gun violence, say, or the climate crisis is sadly beside the point, and Democrats, in particular, should shut up about it. (This means you, Speaker Pelosi.)
Charles P Pierce
Amen.
This is a clear and present danger to the constitutional order. Without the power of the purse, Congress has no power at all.
One of the more grotesque features of this administration*'s policy toward migrant families is the obvious fact that the administration* clearly has been making it up as it goes along, with no real plan about what to do next, and absolutely no appreciation for unintended consequences. [...] From
The Daily Beast:
As part of the Trump administration’s plan to jail undocumented immigrants on military bases, the site at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, is slated to hold up to 7,5000 unaccompanied children. Attorneys with Earthjustice, the nation’s largest nonprofit environmental law organization, say that the proposed location’s status as a former landfill and Superfund site should preclude it from ever being used for housing—particularly for children, who are especially vulnerable to environmental contaminants.
[...]
The contaminants include arsenic, benzene, lead, and PFAS, a pollutant that has been found to affect neurodevelopment and increase risk of learning delays and autism.
I guarantee you that nobody in the administration* ever checked on the suitability of this site on which it plans to warehouse unaccompanied minor children.
Charles P Pierce
That's giving them the benefit of the doubt.
I guarantee you that nobody there knows fck-all about benzene, or PFAS, or even the SuperFund. Nobody there even bothered to take the military's opinion into account.
Among the people who have opposed plans to house undocumented children on military bases are U.S. military officers and enlisted personnel, one of whom told The Daily Beast in June 2018 that the plan “smacks of totalitarianism.” In an Aug. 2018 letter addressed to then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, nearly two dozen retired senior officers urged the Defense Department to rethink the plan, which they wrote would “divert critical defense resources from core military functions, reduce service member readiness, and detract from their ability to protect our homeland and defend our interests abroad."
They don't know and they don't care. There's no plan beyond lock them away.
Certainly they don't care.
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