[ Posted Wednesday, March 13th, 2019 – 16:26 UTC ]
If I had been in a more pedantic mood, that headline would have more-properly read: "And Then There Were Fifty-Two," but that doesn't really have the same ring to it. Whichever math you prefer, there is now a solid majority in the Senate to pass the House's measure rescinding President Trump's "national emergency" declaration at the southern border. A fifth Republican senator, Mike Lee, just announced he'll be voting for the measure, which means there are already 52 votes for it in advance of tomorrow's floor vote. This should assure its passage, and will likely lead to the first presidential veto of Trump's tenure in office.
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[ Posted Friday, March 8th, 2019 – 19:06 UTC ]
President Donald Trump, as we all know, is a big fan of walls. Big, beautiful walls, according to him. But although he's never gotten Mexico to pony up a single peso for his border wall, and is still having trouble convincing Congress that it's the right thing to do, when future historians look back on this week, they might mark it as when Trump began constructing a metaphorical wall between his administration and Congress. Because the first big block of stone was just deposited on the White House lawn -- with 81 more big stone blocks waiting in the wings.
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[ Posted Friday, March 1st, 2019 – 19:11 UTC ]
In a bizarre development this week, President Donald Trump brought unity to all the politicians in Washington. He managed this feat by failing to get any deal out of his much-hyped summit meeting with North Korea's murderous dictator Kim Jong Un. When news of this failure on the international stage reached Washington (in [...]
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 26th, 2019 – 18:24 UTC ]
Just before I sat down to write this, the news broke that the House of Representatives had voted (245-182) to nullify President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. But rather than focusing on the personality-driven nature of this particular vote, I think it is worth taking a step back and looking at it through a bigger-picture lens. Because this isn't the only historic action Congress is currently considering when it comes to retaking constitutional powers that it had previously handed over to the executive branch. Taken together with the upcoming Senate vote on ending American involvement in the war in Yemen, this represents what could be the beginnings of a historic shift in power back to the legislative branch, which would return some power to the legislature that the framers of the Constitution never intended the president to have in the first place.
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[ Posted Friday, February 22nd, 2019 – 18:25 UTC ]
The news media -- once again -- has been in a frenzy over the possibility that Robert Mueller will wrap up his investigation next week and issue his long-awaited report. They've gone down this road before, as have President Trump's legal advisors (who have been telling Trump the whole thing is going to be over very soon now for almost a solid year and a half). So you'll forgive us for not being all that convinced that this is indeed the time that Lucy won't pull the football away, and we'll finally get to kick it thumpingly down the field!
Perhaps we're being a wee bit too cynical? Maybe. But then again, maybe not. We'll see what next week brings.
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[ Posted Monday, February 18th, 2019 – 18:48 UTC ]
But instead, today I'd like to look a bit further into the past, because there is one particular court case which everyone is going to be paying a lot of attention to in the upcoming weeks. The case is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, usually now just referred to as the Youngstown case or "the steel case." The plaintiff was a steel company in Ohio and the defendant was the Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer. But the real defendant was President Harry Truman, who had directed the federal government to seize control of all the steel plants of the country, in order to avoid an imminent strike. Truman believed he had this power because American was in the midst of the Korean War at the time, therefore he reasoned he had presidential power to avoid disruptions to the war effort.
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[ Posted Friday, February 15th, 2019 – 18:28 UTC ]
Emergency! Ahh! Everybody run!
Sigh. Well, here we are. Not only has Donald Trump become the first president to order the military to do essentially nothing just to make a political point (see: midterms 2018, border deployment), he has now become the first president to declare a national emergency because he made a political promise he just couldn't keep. He couldn't keep it because -- counter to his own self-portrayal as a dealmaking genius -- Donald Trump is such a terrible dealmaker that he couldn't even get a Republican Congress to give him what he wanted, for two whole years. And if that isn't a national emergency, then what is?
Let's just take a moment to quickly review how we got here. Donald Trump began his presidential campaign warning about the flood of evil brown people who were coming to rape and murder us all in our own beds. He boiled this down into one call-and-response phrase to use at his rallies:
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[ Posted Friday, February 8th, 2019 – 18:52 UTC ]
It's been an eventful week, with Trump's second State Of The Union speech and Virginia politics entering complete free-fall. Democrats in the House began work in earnest this week as well, on both the legislative and investigative fronts. Also, there are now some new Boondocks comics! So the week was anything but dull, although it was a bit disjointed.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 7th, 2019 – 17:30 UTC ]
President Donald Trump is not a happy camper. This was plain to see in his morning tweetstorm, where he finally realizes that he did not, in fact, win the 2018 midterm election. There has been a transfer of power in the House of Representatives, and Trump is finally waking up to what this is going to mean for both him personally and for his administration. Most normal politicians would have cottoned onto this basic fact over three months ago, but Trump is anything but normal.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 5th, 2019 – 23:21 UTC ]
As usual, what follows are my own snap reactions to President Donald Trump's second State Of The Union speech (he's actually now given three such addresses to Congress, but the first one doesn't technically count as a State Of The Union speech). I write all of this before hearing or reading what other pundits thought, so I won't be influenced by any sort of groupthink about the speech.
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