It is truly amazing how fast the wheels are coming off for Unindicted Co-consprirator Bottomless Pinocchio.
Oh that. Look, I could catch you up on the plot which is extremely complicated and involves about 10 love triangles as well as umm… magic you know so it requires a thorough suspension of disbelief. There’s also a Basic Cable level of Sex and Violence, Brakebills is not Hogwarts. What I really want to point out is how talented the Actors are, it’s not like Cop Rock where they break out in song every episode, only once in a while. They’ve also done a passable rendition of “One Day More” from Les Misérables.
But you probably want to know what’s causing the sparks coming off the bottom of the Radio Flyer.
If Trump declares a national emergency, Pelosi can jam Republicans. Here’s how.
By Greg Sargent, Washington Post
February 4, 2019
Senate Republicans appear to be in a panic about President Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency to realize his unquenchable fantasy of a big, beautiful wall on the southern border. Republicans are reportedly worried that such a move could divide them, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has delivered that warning to Trump in private conversations.
Republicans have good reason to be deeply nervous. Here’s why: According to one of the country’s leading experts on national emergencies, it appears that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can trigger a process that could require the GOP-controlled Senate to hold a vote on such a declaration by Trump — which would put Senate Republicans in a horrible political position.
Trump reiterated his threat to declare a national emergency in an interview with CBS News that aired over the weekend. “I don’t take anything off the table,” Trump said, adding in a typically mangled construction that he still retains the “alternative” of “national emergency.”
Trump does have the power to declare such an emergency under the post-Watergate National Emergencies Act, which also requires him to identify which other specific statute delegating emergency powers he’s invoking. Trump is expected to rely on one of several statutes that authorize military officials, in a presidentially declared emergency, to redirect funds for purposes that are either “essential to the national defense” or support “use of the armed forces.”
The Post reports that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has privately told Trump that a national emergency is “viable,” and officials at the Army Corps of Engineers are searching for ways to build the wall. This would be challenged in the courts, which would have to decide whether the statute Trump invoked actually does authorize this type of spending.
But Pelosi has a much more immediate way to challenge Trump’s declaration. Under the National Emergencies Act, or NEA, both chambers of Congress can pass a resolution terminating any presidentially declared national emergency.
Elizabeth Goitein, who has researched this topic extensively for the Brennan Center for Justice, tells me that if Pelosi exercises this option, it will ultimately require the Senate to vote on it in some form as well. The NEA stipulates that if one chamber (Pelosi’s House) passes such a resolution, which it easily could do, the other (McConnell’s Senate) must act on it within a very short time period — forcing GOP senators to choose whether to support it.
Alternatively, Goitein notes, the Senate could vote not to consider that resolution or change its rules to avoid such a vote. But in those scenarios, the Senate would, in effect, be voting to greenlight Trump’s emergency declaration.
The NEA lays out a timetable for this process, and by Goitein’s reading, it would all take place within the protracted period of barely longer than a month. “In short, there could be 36 days between introduction of the resolution in the House and a vote on the Senate floor,” Goitein told me, “but that vote would have to happen,” and once it did, one way or the other, it would put senators “on record.”
A Democratic leadership aide tells me the House might opt for this move if Trump takes the plunge. “The House will vigorously challenge any declaration that seeks an end run around Congress’s power of the purse,” the aide says.
Republicans themselves have let it be known that they fear this scenario. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), an adviser to McConnell, has said that a Senate vote on any Trump-declared national emergency would be inevitable, and McConnell has told Trump that Congress might have to act in such a fashion. Both of these appear to be references to a scenario like the one outlined above.
Both men have also said this would deeply divide Republicans. One unnamed Republican senator even told the Washington Examiner that Trump would suffer major defections in such a vote.
GOP senators would have to decide between going on record in favor of a presidential declaration of a national emergency for something that everyone knows is based on false pretenses, a move that would be opposed by two-thirds of the country, or opposing it and possibly forcing a Trump veto (which they then would have to decide whether to override), enraging Trump’s base.
You get ’em Nancy. Make their lives as difficult as possible.
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