Pelosi to Joe B.: Don't debate Trump

Speaker Pelosi says Biden shouldn't debate President Trump because he will 'belittle' the purpose

"I myself -- just don't tell anybody who told you this, especially don't tell Joe Biden: I don't think that there should be any debates," Pelosi, D-Calif., volunteered during a news conference with reporters at the Capitol Thursday morning. 

"I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody should [and] has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts."

Biden insists he will debate Trump after Pelosi remarks

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Thursday said that he would debate President Trump shortly after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested that Biden shouldn’t “legitimize” the incumbent president by participating in debates.

“No. As long as the commission continues down the straight now as they have, I’m going to debate him,” Biden told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell when asked whether he would consider not debating Trump following Pelosi’s comments.

“I am going to be the fact checker on the stage while I’m debating him,” Biden continued.

Pelosi snippish as another Dem media journo presses her on compromise to get another relief bill passed soon

Right now on MSNBC.

She and Schumer both today reject Trump's suggestion he will take executive action as too little too late and a terrible distraction.

And she alludes to the fact that it's another effort on his part to unconstitutionally repurpose money appropriated for other things.

She says expecting anything helpful from the GOP is mistaking them for somebody who gives a damn.

The Malevolent Troll in the White House strikes out at twenty-odd million Americans

At The Height Of Pandemic, Trump Asks SCOTUS To Wipe Out Obamacare

And they just might do it.

Joe Biden yesterday attacked Trump's cruelty for trying to prevent Americans from having reliable health care. 

Late last night, proving him right, the Trump administration joined a serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

. . . .

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has announced a vote Monday to expand the health care act, calling Trump's move "an act of unfathomable cruelty.”

Pelosi accuses the Duce and his supporters of what they openly advocate

It's all in the spin.

Spun one way it's a shocking crime against the American people. Spun another, it's realistic defense of their best interests, in net.

Well, not quite all.

Lurking not very far in the background are differing guesses at the net damage done by the spread of the disease on the one side and measures to slow or limit it on the other.

Pelosi accuses Trump of costing US lives with coronavirus denials and delays

Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, delivered a devastating critique of Donald Trump on Sunday, accusing the president directly of costing American lives through his constant denials and delays in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

“The president’s denial at the beginning was deadly,” the House Speaker told CNN’s State of the Union. 

“His delay in getting equipment to where it’s needed is deadly … As the president fiddles, people are dying.”

More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths had been confirmed in the US by Sunday morning, among about 125,000 confirmed cases, the most in any country.

Asked if she was saying Trump’s early downplaying of the severity of the coronavirus crisis had “cost American lives”, Pelosi replied: “Yes I am. I’m saying that.”

The rightwing figures pushing Trump's 'back-to-work' policy despite pandemic

As Donald Trump has pushed his shock policy reversal to try to soon get many Americans to go back to work, despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, he has been supported by a wide array of rightwing figures, business groups and conservative politicians.

Some of those conservatives have taken the president’s concerns over the dire health of the US economy a step further – suggesting that the inevitable deaths of many people to the virus might be an acceptable cost of doing business in the face of a shocking economic collapse that saw more than 3 million new people register for unemployment.

“My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves,” Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, said last week on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

“Don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick continued.

Patrick even suggested many older Americans would happily risk their lives for the sake of the economy.

“No one reached out to me and said: ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick also said. 

“And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that, I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.”

Graham for Trump and (again) against the constitution

Graham urges Senate rules change to speed impeachment trial

Seeking to break a deadlock over President Donald Trump’s impeachment, a top Republican said Sunday he will push a change in rules that would allow a Senate trial to move forward immediately if Democrats do not agree to its format this week.

He is urging blatantly unconstitutional behavior upon the senate, reportedly to please the Duce and express his impatience.

The constitution consigns the role of prosecuting in the senate to the house.

Can't proceed without prosecution and can't deny that role to the house.

But it seems there is a concerted strategy of Republicans emerging to force Pelosi to send over the articles of impeachment and thus clear the way for some quick senate cover-up while the press is obsessed with the new Iran/Iraq crisis.

Or just to say fuck it and ditch the thing unconstitutionally.

The Duce informed a few of his congressional supporters, but no Dems. Contrary to law.

Pelosi says Trump carried out strike on Iranian commander without authorization and she wants details

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is calling on the Trump administration to immediately brief lawmakers on the U.S. airstrike that killed a top Iranian commander in Iraq and what the White House plans to do next.

The strike in Iraq was directed by President Donald Trump and killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's secretive Quds Force, the Department of Defense announced Thursday night.

The move, which is likely to provoke retaliation from Iran, comes amid heightened tensions between the Trump administration and Tehran over rocket attacks aimed at coalition forces in Iraq. 

U.S. officials have said those attacks were likely carried out by Iranian-backed militias with links to the Quds Force.

"Tonight's airstrike risks provoking further dangerous escalation of violence. America — and the world — cannot afford to have tensions escalate to the point of no return," Pelosi said in a statement late Thursday.

The strike was carried out without an "authorization for use of military force" against Iran and without the consultation of Congress, the speaker said.

Others are publicly saying "we need to presume we are in a state of war with Iran."

Apparently, Trump is now tweeting that he didn't tell the Dems in advance for the same reason he didn't tell the Iranians in advance.

He has in the past used this veiled accusation of complicity with the enemy to justify keeping the Dems, but not selected Republican congressional allies, in the dark in advance of a dangerous move.

Political Scientist Highlights New Military ‘Norm’ — Trump Consults Only With Those Who Praise Him

While Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the Gang of Eight in general, and other important members of Congress were left in the dark about President Donald Trump’s plans to attack a high-ranking military official from Iran, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s top defenders, told hosts on Fox & Friends that Trump did speak to him about the matter while he was at Mar-a-Lago.

“I was briefed about the potential operation when I was down in Florida,” Graham said, per a tweet from CBS News’ Alan He, who was watching the senator speak on the program in real-time. “I appreciate being brought into the orbit.”

Trump briefed Graham but not the Gang of Eight

Or put another way, we’re apparently moving away from the Gang of Eight reporting process and toward a process in which the president notifies an allied senator about national security decisions while sharing a tee time.

If this sounds at all familiar, Trump also kept the Gang of Eight in the dark on the mission targeting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of ISIS, a few months ago. 

The president did alert Lindsey Graham – who is not a member of the Gang of Eight and whose Senate responsibilities do not require notifications like these.

Pelosi angrily rejects a question that slanders her with a Trumpist talking point

They cannot deny he did what he did and cannot convince anyone it wasn't illegal or it doesn't matter.

So it's all bullshit about Democrats hating him for his unexpected victory over Hillary that they wish out of hatred and resentment to delegitimate and overturn.

She's not one to make it easy.

Nancy Pelosi tells Sinclair reporter James Rosen: ‘Don’t mess with me!’

“Do you hate the president, Ms. Speaker?” the reporter, James Rosen from the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, asked during Pelosi’s weekly press briefing at the Capitol.

“I don’t hate anybody. We don’t hate anybody. Not anybody in the world. Don’t accuse me,” she said, leaving the podium to approach Rosen and pointing at him as she spoke.

He then interrupted her, saying he was asking about a charge from a GOP lawmaker during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing Wednesday that Democrats wanted Trump gone only because they didn’t like him.

“I did not accuse you. I asked you a question. Rep. [Doug] Collins yesterday suggested that the Democrats are doing this simply because you don’t like the guy. I think it is an important point,” he said, referring to the Georgia lawmaker, a fervent Trump backer.

He was as good as heckling her, making very sure to repeat the allegation to her face as provocatively as possible.

Pelosi then walked back to the podium and continued to lecture Rosen.

“This is about the Constitution of the United States and the facts that lead to the president’s violation of his oath of office. And as a Catholic, I resent your using the word hate in a sentence that addresses me,” she said, adding that she prays for Trump.

In a country where the classe politique gave a shit about the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the like, he would have been gone long ago

Pelosi announces impeachment inquiry into Trump over Ukraine scandal

It's too much about winning at any cost.

They're all Nixonians who can't resist even the most absurd and unnecessary crimes.

Hammering home the key point: 2018 was a huge victory for center-left Democrats, not for Squaddies

Frank Bruni

If Trump has his way, this campaign will be a bogus referendum on a bastard definition of patriotism. 

It will be a race-obsessed and racist jubilee. 

Don’t play along.

But, you say, his racism must be called out. 

A demagogue must be branded as such. 

Not to condemn incipient fascism is to play midwife to the real thing.

That’s a virtuous take, but is there really any reason to believe that it’s the recipe for Trump’s demise?

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. 

Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. 

Check out the Times, the Guardian, and every Dem site in the known universe.

They're doing it again.

Race-baiting the GOP, 24/7.

Again.

How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump

Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. 

That’s the 2018 midterms.

It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. 

More important, their victories had zilch to do with why or how Democrats regained control of Congress and have dubious relevance to how Democrats can do the same with the White House in 2020. 

The House members they replaced were Democrats, not Republicans, so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.

Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. 

Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. 

None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They touted more restrained agendas. 

And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. 

They knew they didn’t need to. 

For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.

Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. 

Both lost. 

While first-time candidates endorsed by the progressive groups Justice Democrats or Our Revolution certainly won House elections last year, not one flipped a seat. 

The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.

. . . .

 Polling has shown that when voters are told that Medicare for all would mean an end to private insurance or an increase in taxes, support for it drops below 40 percent.

And according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey published a few days ago, 51 percent of voters support the sweeping raids by ICE that the president trumpets, while just 35 percent oppose them. 

That suggests that anything that smacks of open borders — which is how President Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, described Democratic presidential candidates’ positions in a recent op-ed essay in The Washington Post — puts those candidates at odds with public opinion.

. . . .

Nancy Pelosi knows this. 

It’s why she hasn’t been talking up the Green New Deal, single-payer insurance or impeachment, and the suggestion that this makes her some squishy centrist pushover — some musty relic from a timid era — is bunk. 

She has her eyes on the most meaningful prize, one she pursued successfully in the midterms: Democratic victory. 

And she can see that in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll published a little over a week ago, just 21 percent of registered voters said that there was enough evidence for Congress to begin impeachment hearings.

. . . .

I wonder what would happen if the Democratic nominee simply refused to talk about Trump. 

No responding to whatever stupid nickname he comes up with. 

No sweeping denunciation of some deed of his that any sensible American already knows is wrong. 

Just the articulation of better solutions to America’s problems. 

Trump would go mad with the lack of attention. 

And maybe then, thank heaven, he’d go away.

When was Maureen Dowd last absolutely right? Yesterday.

Scaling Wokeback Mountain

For Pelosi, the party leadership, and the so-called "centrists".

Well, it is a relative term.

Relative to the national spectrum they are center-left.

Anyway, MD is for them and against the squaddies and their self-important, arrogant, ambitious, and delusional allies.

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.

“What votes did you get?” Emanuel said, rhetorically challenging A.O.C.’s chief of staff. “You should only be so lucky to learn from somebody like Nancy who has shown incredible courage and who has twice returned the Democratic Party to power.

“We fought for years to create the majorities to get a Democratic president elected and re-elected, and they’re going to dither it away. 

"They have not decided what’s more important: Do they want to beat Trump or do they want to clear the moderate and centrists out of the party? 

Thing is, they have decided.

And it's not what he wanted.

"You really think weakening the speaker is the right strategy to try to get rid of Donald Trump and everything he stands for?”

In the age of Trump, there is no more stupid proposition than that Nancy Pelosi is the problem. 

If A.O.C. and her Pygmalions and acolytes decide that burning down the House is more important than deposing Trump, they will be left with a racist backward president and the emotional satisfaction of their own purity.

That and, they hope, a Democratic Party more or less permanently moved significantly closer to their capitalism-hating, system-hating, white people hating, Western Civilization hating, children of Zinn views.

These guys have chosen purity over possibility. And they clearly have no idea of respecting seniority.

By no means only on this one issue.

The Squad

Congressional approval for funds for the Trump administration to spend at the southern border has triggered open warfare between a “squad” of high-profile progressive House Democrats and party leaders they accuse of caving to a White House determined to mistreat migrant children.

Pelosi and most Democrats voted for it.

But it was close.

Ninety-five Democrats voted against Thursday afternoon's bill, while 129 supported it. 

Seven Republicans opposed the measure, with 176 in favor.

The Squaddies were by no means alone on the vote.

But they probably tweeted only for themselves.

The split became brutally evident late last month when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts – together known as “The Squad” – voted against when Pelosi moved to pass a Senate bill that provided $4.59bn in border security funding.

. . . .

Responding on Twitter, Omar said: “A vote for Mitch McConnell’s border bill is a vote to keep kids in cages and terrorize immigrant communities.”

Tlaib declared: “If you see the Senate bill as an option, then you don’t believe in basic human rights.”

Ocasio-Cortez said: “Hell no. That’s an abdication of power.”

On Saturday, Pelosi responded in a New York Times interview, taking aim at The Squad for voting against “our bill”.

“All these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world,” she said. 

“But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people and that’s how many votes they got.”

Referring, I think, to a different vote.

In a tweeted response, Ocasio-Cortez said: “That public ‘whatever’ is called public sentiment. And wielding the power to shift it is how we actually achieve meaningful change in this country.” 

She also defended her use of social media.

The progressive-moderate split is becoming more evident and bitter.

“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” Pelosi told the Times.

Referring to her long career and past defeats for progressive policy priorities, the speaker, 79, added: “As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer [healthcare] from 30 years ago.

“I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”

. . . .

“Leadership is driven by fear,” Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez and a co-founder of Justice Democrats, told the Washington Post. 

“They seem to be unable to lead.”

“The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic party,” Trent added.

Ocasio-Cortez told the Post fear of losing is beside the point for new party members.

“What’s important isn’t just winning but fighting,” she said. 

“I don’t care about losing in the short term, because we know we’re fighting for the long term.”

She is too young to appreciate that in the long run we are all just dead.

Politics is about a sequence of short runs that add up, together, to a longer run.

On Sunday, Tlaib disputed claims by acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan that the additional funds are a way to get children out of CBP custody. 

But she soon turned her fire on Pelosi.

“It is very disappointing that the speaker would ever try to diminish our voices in so many ways,” she told ABC’s This Week.

Tlaib called on Pelosi to “honor the fact we are there, that 650,000 people are represented by each and every single one of us” and that “all of us have these experiences that I think have been missing in the halls of Congress. Honor that, respect that, put us at the table. Let’s come up with a solution together.”

She said she would not “support anything that is broken and that dehumanizes people”.

Pelosi, Tlaib said, should “uplift the women, especially the women of color, within your caucus … because I’ll tell you more people like us, more people like me that come out to vote, we win, all of us win.”

Just as I said: no respect for seniority.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Speaker

Maureen Dowd:

It’s Nancy Pelosi’s Parade

“With all due respect, the press likes to make a story that is more about Democrats divided than the fact that Mitch McConnell doesn’t care about the children,’’ she [NP] said, referring to what she called “trash” stories about a supposed rift between her and Chuck Schumer. 

She also accused the press of “constantly enabling” Trump by allowing him to suck up all the oxygen and says journalists are “accomplices to their own denigration.”

“You would think that within a couple of days, 48 hours or so, of seeing that little child with her father, there would have been some challenge of conscience,’’ she said of Republicans. 

“But understand this: They don’t care.”

. . . .

The speaker, who is trying to keep the party center left, must know that getting Trump out of office is a goal that could be jeopardized by the fact that the Democrats lurched so far left in the first debates, with bilingual pandering and talk about busing and decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance.

This is the pol whose name was synonymous for decades with extreme San Francisco liberalism. 

(A “Saturday Night Live” sketch in 2006 depicted Pelosi, played by Kristen Wiig, talking to a pair of chain-and-leather-clad aides, one with a ball-gag in his mouth.) 

Now, astonishingly, the woman formerly scorned as a pinko is the voice of moderation, urging the kids to turn down the music and slow their roll or risk having a second unbearable helping of Trump.

“If the left doesn’t think I’m left enough, so be it,” she said, breezily. 

“As I say to these people, come to my basement. I have these signs about single-payer from 30 years ago. I understand what they’re saying. But we have a responsibility to get something done, which is different from advocacy. We have to have a solution, not just a Twitter fight.”

. . . .

Pelosi is womanly — often surrounded by her children and grandchildren — and yet she seems blithely unencumbered by insecurity about her gender.

This is in marked contrast to Hillary Clinton, the only other woman who rose to these heights in American politics. 

She was certainly tough enough, brainy enough and experienced enough to take on Trump. 

But she was always getting wrapped around the gender axel, ignoring Tina Fey’s advice to take a bad-ass “bitch is the new black” approach.

. . . .

Her experiences with the last two Democratic presidents were not exactly a stroll down the Embarcadero.

Bill Clinton upended his party with his reckless, selfish affair with an intern.

She must have loathed that fathead; I certainly did.

But it started when he betrayed his own party the first [and, admittedly, lesser] time, saying "The era of Big Government is over."

Barack Obama never could have scooted past Clinton Inc. without Pelosi’s well-manicured thumb on the scale for him, and he certainly could not have passed the Affordable Care Act without her muscle. 

But in the midterms that followed, Pelosi lost 63 of her foot soldiers and her gavel; some in the party felt that President Obama had failed to supply enough air cover for the members who had gone out on a limb for him after Pelosi cajoled and prodded in a manner that L.B.J. would have admired.

. . . .

If combating an inhumane Trump requires a superhuman effort, Pelosi may be just the woman to do it. 

Her staffers tell the story of how, last April, Pelosi was with a congressional delegation in Dublin, about to deliver a major address to the Irish Parliament. 

As she got into her Suburban in the motorcade, a 300-pound armored car door was accidentally closed on her right hand, crushing it in the locking mechanism.

The attending physician could offer her only ordinary Band-Aids to stop the bleeding from the wounds on her hand and Advil for a tear so bad that doctors who stitched her up afterward said that she could have lost her fingers.

Pelosi not only managed to get through the speech. She shook hundreds of hands without flinching.

When I asked her about it, she was only rueful that she couldn’t concentrate enough to speak the Gaelic she had practiced.

The show must go on, eh?

That's the spirit!

In a major policy speech, Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling to end the Senate filibuster. 

She is the first major presidential candidate to endorse ending the Senate’s historic [in my view unconstitutional- PV] rule which requires 60 votes to pass legislation.

Warren made her announcement at the National Action Network today. 

It came just two days after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the  “nuclear option” to reduce debate time of presidential nominees. 

This allowed Republicans to railroad through huge numbers of conservative judicial picks made by Donald Trump.

Now, according to Senator Warren, it’s time for Democrats to “fight back.”

“I’m not running for President just to talk about making real, structural change. I’m serious about getting it done. And part of getting it done means waking up to the reality of the United States Senate,” Warren said, before adding:

“So let me be as clear as I can. When Democrats next have power, we should be bold and clear: we’re done with two sets of rules — one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats.”

“That means when Democrats have the White House again, if Mitch McConnell tries to do what he did to President Obama, and puts small-minded partisanship ahead of solving the massive problems facing this country, then we should get rid of the filibuster.”

Warren said before that eliminating the Senate filibuster should be a topic of discussion. She wants to have a debate in the 2020 presidential campaign about whether to keep it or not.

But with Democrats like Warren talking about big ideas like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and new tax plans, it’s become more and more clear that a minority of GOP senators could stop them, even if Democrats sweep the 2020 election, taking the House, the Senate and the presidency.

Republicans have this power because there’s no way for Democrats to put together 60 seats in next year’s elections.

. . . .

"For generations, the filibuster was used as a tool to block progress on racial justice. And in recent years, it’s been used by the far right as a tool to block progress on everything,” Warren said. 

“I’ve only served one term in the Senate — but I’ve seen what’s happening. We all saw what they did to President Obama. I’ve watched Republicans abuse the rules when they’re out of power, then turn around and blow off the rules when they’re in power.”

Other presidential candidates have not supported Warren’s position. Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) don’t want to change the filibuster.

But Warren’s endorsement today of ending the filibuster in the Senate will be sure to add it to the debate in the 2020 presidential campaign.

So Sanders wants his agenda to fail?

Because if the senate keeps the filibuster the AOC/Bernie agenda will be DOA.

On the other hand, arguably it will fail anyway.

A goodly piece of the Democratic majorities in house and senate that we hope for will be made up of people who will not support Medicare for All or Bernie's tuition plan.

People who ran in districts in which even Nancy Pelosi seems too far left, and she is not on board for the AOC/Bernie agenda, either.

Nancy Pelosi says Obamacare is best path to ‘quality, affordable’ health care

But even to get through helpful legislation those Democrats would support will be impossible against a filibuster.

And then what do they do, what does anybody do, if the courts give Bozo what he's asked for and declare every bit of the ACA unconstitutional?

Time for court packing?

Trump's plan is to usurp the power of the purse

Trump to declare national emergency as Senate passes border security spending deal

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said if Trump declares a national emergency, he is "doing an end run around Congress" and Democrats will consider legal action to stop him.

McConnell says he nevertheless will support the president in doing that, and speculation has been that Trump insisted on that in return for his accepting the deal.

Nancy Pelosi suggested some future Democrat might declare some sort of gun violence emergency, though how that would be at all comparable I do not know.

Trump thinks declaring illegal immigration a national emergency enables him to use money appropriated for other purposes to build a wall he claims is the only effective way to stem the tide, though it doesn't and doing that is blatantly unconstitutional.

So some Democrat declares gun violence is a national emergency and then does what?

Newsies are speculating that it's more likely the supposed future Democratic president would declare a climate change emergency and then freely legislate carbon limits, gas price hikes, expanded subsidies for electric cars, and so on to deal with it.

Trump and the Republicans were right, by the way, to complain that Obama's creation of DACA was an unconstitutional usurpation of the power to make law, done when the congress refused to legislate DACA for him.

And this, but the way, is really "how democracies die".

Actual office holding political parties decide their agendas are much more important than the integrity of their political institutions, and so they bring out the wrecking balls.

And at least some of their popular supporters agree with them.

Oh, and if you think we can or should count on the courts to defend the constitution against agenda driven subversion when the court shares the agenda you should consider how courts have dealt with the Duce's efforts to discontinue DACA on the entirely legitimate ground that it was unconstitutional for Obama to put the program in place after the congress had refused to do it.

Far too many office holders consider the constitution less important their their party's agenda.

I am not saying agenda driven interpretation of the constitution or the law is always pernicious.

It is in place when there really is damn all other basis to decide among plausible but importantly different competing interpretations that best serve different or opposing agendas.

But this is just not that.

Pelosi mocks the orangutan

Nancy Pelosi clapped at Trump during State of the Union. The memes quickly followed

The Guardian called it a walrus clap.

Americans are calling it a golf clap.

No wall money. At all. Ever.

Pelosi rules out money for border wall, Trump says no deal without it

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she will “of course” allow a floor vote on any bipartisan border security proposal crafted by congressional negotiators, but she drew a red line, insisting "there's not going to be any wall money in the legislation."

Pelosi's declaration from Capitol Hill reverberated down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, prompting President Donald Trump to shoot back at Pelosi's insistence that Congress will not fund the border wall.

“If there's no wall, it doesn't work," Trump told reporters at an Oval Office photo-op. 

"She's just playing games."

Trump openly contemplated removing the border wall near Tijuana to show Californians like Pelosi how integral a barrier is to controlling the flow of immigrants into the United States.

"If you take down that wall you’ll have so many people coming into our country that Nancy Pelosi will be begging for a wall," Trump predicted. 

"She’ll be begging for a wall. She will say 'Please, please, Mr. President, give us a wall.'"

Pelosi said that congressional negotiators should be free to reach a "consensus of their own devices" -- but expressed confidence that Democrats won't allow the talks to produce an agreement that provides any funding to construct physical barriers along the border.

A misstep for Nancy

She should have made him wait until after the budget issues were fully resolved.

That means after any additional shutdown.

When does that two week the government is living on expire?

Trump accepts Pelosi's State of the Union invite

President Donald Trump has accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's invitation to give his State of the Union address on February 5, the White House announced Monday evening.

Update.

Or maybe not.

Does he stand up in front of likely the biggest audience he's ever had and bluster, threaten, and bully?

Does he again own whatever damage he does when the Democrats don't give him wall money?

The Duce is setting himself up for further humiliation

Trump tries to bounce back after horrible day damages presidency

This morning he tweeted the same lying nonsense.

The only lie about the wall he does not hourly repeat is that Mexico will pay for it.

21 days goes very quickly. 

Negotiations with Democrats will start immediately. 

Will not be easy to make a deal, both parties very dug in. 

The case for National Security has been greatly enhanced by what has been happening at the Border & through dialogue. 

We will build the Wall!

And this.

"If he gives in now, that's the end of 2019 in terms of him being an effective President," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said on Fox News earlier this month. 

"That's probably the end of his presidency."

Graham is known for hyperbole. 

But his comment encapsulates the challenge that the President now has in battling to regain his authority.

His safest move, I think, if he remains unwilling to appear to totally give up on his wall, is to declare a national emergency and hope the flood of new conservative judges appointed on his watch will surprise the nation with the news that he can do whatever he wants in the name of an emergency he is entirely free to invent.

Another shutdown would not work out any better for him than this one, and might provoke the Republicans to rebel.

Even being told to pound sand with his emergency by the courts would do him and the GOP less harm than another shutdown.

Always assuming Nancy and Chuck are never going to give him more than that one dollar for the wall.

Thing is, a significant majority of Americans think the wall is bollocks, already.

If he keeps trying to build it he just keeps annoying all those folks.

Who will be even more annoyed if he actually does build it - all of it or even part of it.

For the next two years, the most interesting and consequential political leader in DC will be Nancy Pelosi

The key feature of republican rule is not that the power of the government is limited vis-à-vis civil society, as libertarians and other partisans of bare-knuckle capitalism and the power of corporations, the rich, and the owners of the means of production would have it.

That is to say, limited vis-à-vis corporations, the rich, and the owners of the means of production.

It is that the power of individual officials of the government is limited.

No one is "the Decider", C student GW notwithstanding.

Dispersal of power among multitudes of officials is the key to preservation of republican liberties.

Tyranny is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

Totalitarianism is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

Monarchy in any form is impossible so long as the republic is intact.

The power to make laws in our republic is dispersed among 535 congresspeople in two separate houses.

The highest authority to interpret the laws and the constitution is dispersed among the several justices of the Supreme Court.

Only the powers to see that the laws are faithfully executed and of ultimate command of the armed forces are put into the hands of one person.

And yet Nancy Pelosi was able to teach Bozo, the president of the United States and so the most powerful individual official in the American republic, what dispersal of power, what checks and balances, means.

A lesson he managed somehow not to learn with the failure of repeal of Obamacare in the senate by one vote.

Asked after Trump's speech today whether now at last she and the Democrats would give the Duce some wall money, Nancy said no.

‘Have I not been clear about the wall?’ Pelosi signals Trump still won’t get what he wants

Democrats say they will not agree to provide funding for the wall, period. 

If they were willing to entertain that, they would’ve done so before the government shutdown in December or in the more than a month since as roughly 800,000 federal workers went without pay. 

“Have I not been clear on the wall?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Friday when one asked if Democrats would continue to object to wall funding in the upcoming negotiations. 

“I’ve been very clear.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer was more direct: “Democrats are against the wall.”

Trump agreed to reopen government “without preconditions,” the New York Democrat noted, as he proudly pointed out that the agreement endorses the position Democrats have held throughout the shutdown. 

“Our unity is our power,” Pelosi said. 

“And that is what maybe the president underestimated.”

Trump flinches

Agreeing to reopen the government for three weeks in return for talks involving the Democrats but no wall money, Bozo promised that if he doesn't get his wall money at the end of that time he will either again shut down the government or declare a national emergency and build his wall on his own.

So, this will turn out to be a surrender or not depending on what happens in three weeks, since I can't see Pelosi giving him more than the dollar she mentioned some weeks ago.

But during these three weeks the pressure for her to give him rather more wall money than that from wusses among Democrats and in generally pro-Democratic media will escalate.

She has from the first not only called the wall stupid but labeled it immoral.

She has from the first said, in any negotiations, she would be willing to give him some wall money, exactly one dollar.

So we'll see not only whether Trump has surrendered, but whether Pelosi will.

Trump Concedes to Democrats After Month-Long Shutdown and Will Reopen the Government — Temporarily

And of course the TV broadcast another ten or twenty minutes of him lying to us all about Democrats, immigrants legal and not, and blah blah blah.

Only yesterday Mick Mulvaney was telling us the White House was planning on continuing the shutdown for months, if the Dems wouldn't first give the Duce his $5.7 billion in wall money.

Recall that for King Charles I it was about ship money.

It's always about money, for these assholes.