This morning, Donald Trump declared a national emergency at the Southern Border. He plans to redirect Pentagon and Treasury funding in order to make his border wall a reality.
His actions are in response to Congress refusing to give him funding for his border wall in the first place, and his national emergency is certain to force a constitutional crisis.
Of course, Trump’s national emergency is a load of shit. Mainly because there’s no actual emergency–the DHS’s own data shows that illegal entry into the US is down from what it was two years ago. But anyone with a brain knows that Donald Trump isn’t doing this over a real crisis–he’s doing it because he made an absurd promise on the campaign trail to build a wall, and the government’s checks and balances shut him down. Declaring a national emergency is a hail mary attempt, a prayer that a loophole will get Trump his wall.
So how could Trump’s dictatorial actions possibly be a good thing?
When Trump’s national emergency inevitably goes to court, there are only two possible outcomes. Either he wins, and gets to fund his wall, or he loses. Both outcomes have major upsides for liberals.
If he loses, excellent, we get to re-establish one major line in the sand that Trump’s inane presidency can’t cross–that when Congress checks the President’s spending budget, their say is final. Just because a President might happen to a petulant man-baby who has temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way doesn’t mean government structure should bend to fit his will. This is the ideal outcome, completely squashing Trump’s fascist power play before it can move further.
But let’s say it moves forward in the courts and Trump ends up wasting billions of dollars on an ineffective solution to a largely fictionalized problem. Not only would it most likely fail on every conceivable level (the chance Trump gets his wall finished within the remainder of his term is close to nil), but it would open the door for a future president to declare national emergencies to tackle actual crises, like global warming, that directly affect the future of our species.
That said, this is a very, very bad standard to set. Our entire government system is based upon checks and balances between the three branches, and when one branch tries to exploit loopholes to override the decision of another branch, the system’s very fabric gets called into question. Hopefully America can weather this storm, but if not, the least we can do is hope for a dictator with a better understanding of sentence structure.
Dan Kahan is a writer & screenwriter from Brooklyn, usually rocking a man bun. Find more at dankahanwriter.com
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