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Let’s do a #NationalEmergency thread! I commend @BulwarkOnline editors for this statement on what Trump’s declaration means for Republicans, especially those in Congress (HT @SykesCharlie for this). Might I point out something, though?
2. Issues of Presidential and Congressional authority, legal procedure, and private property rights are all involved in Trump’s latest attempt to play at being dictator. So is whether Republicans, when push comes to shove, will put loyalty to The Leader above all else.
3. However, we got started on this road because of what Trump thinks about nonwhite immigration, and nonwhite immigrants crossing the Mexican border. He’s been very clear about this from the beginning. Nonwhite immigrants, to Trump, are disease. They bring crime & drugs;...
4....they are rapists and murderers. They are a threat to the white race in America. Trump’s view has a strong constituency within the Republican Party. We’re about to find out just how strong. You can’t understand his national emergency declaration without this context.
5. It is possible to construct intellectual justifications for abusing nonwhite immigrants, for denying asylum, even for Trump’s stupid wall, that do not involve race — just as it is possible to invent reasoning for suppressing minority votes that does not mention race.
6. But it is long past time we put aside self-deception. Trump got nominated in 2016 by appealing to white racial resentment; Republican politicians, including unpopular ones like @senatemajldr, count on appeals to that resentment to keep their careers alive.
7. Republicans in Congress who support Trump in this latest self-created crisis support his White America program, of which his stupid wall is the chief symbol. They support Congressional abdication, contempt for property rights and wasting taxpayers’ money as well.
8. Republicans in Congress repelled by Trump’s White America program must support terminating his authority to declare this emergency. I hope they will remember that it was controversy over race that created the GOP in the first place. Republicans were on the other side then.
9. Where are Republicans now? As far as the Steve Kings, Ted Cruzes and Mitch McConnells of the GOP are concerned, we already know. For other Republicans in Congress, we’re about to find out. [end]
