screengrab from https://youtu.be/XD7QUPK0yNk

President Trump seems poised to accept a suboptimal-to-disastrous spending bill (depending upon your point of view) to prevent another government shutdown and declare a national emergency of some sort in order to allow the reprogramming of existing funds to support construction of a border wall. Nancy Pelosi issued a warning on this:

“A Democratic president can declare emergencies, as well,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. “So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans.” Pelosi noted that Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 students and faculty dead. She argued that the real national emergency is not illegal border crossings, but gun violence in the U.S. “Let’s talk about today: The one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America,” Pelosi said. “That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would. “But a Democratic president can do that.”

Gun violence is a national emergency Climate Change is a national emergency Income inequality is a national emergency Access to healthcare is a national emergency Building a wall on the southern border is not. — Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (@repcleaver) February 14, 2019

Let’s cut through the bullsh**. No Democrat and no place at no time on no subject has ever been constrained from doing what they wanted to do because a GOP president had not done it before. It wasn’t a Republican White House that chortled, “Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.” If the Democrats thought they could get away addressing any of their goals of reshaping America into just another totalitarian Third World sh** hole they would have done so by now.

And no, the fact that Trump declares this particular emergency doesn’t have any bearing whatsoever on our ability to criticize future presidents declaring national emergencies we oppose. As they say, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. If you want an example of what a foolish but consistent hobgoblinish mind looks like, this is an example.

A lot of Democrats embraced Obama unilateral actions when Congress refused to enact his priorities – DACA, DAPA, climate regs, etc. Some Rs now saying, well Obama did X Y Z (which they railed about at the time)… — Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) February 15, 2019

Building a freakin fence is not the same as giving 6 million legal residency by legal fiat. Reprogramming existing funds is not the same as restructuring the entire US economy based on the nitwittery of climate change models. You don’t have to agree with a Trump national emergency to have enough brain power to see when things are not the same.

I’m pretty much agnostic on the National Emergency idea. I think the bill should be vetoed because it is a horrible bill. But among the reasons to oppose it, believing that doing so will make Democrats act rationally in the future is not one of them.

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