A win means we get something we want. Like, I dunno, the DREAM act.
Trump not get everything he wants is not, by itself, a win. If he demanded one trillion wall dollars and we gave him only $5.7 billion, would that be a win too? Because we can laugh about the $995 billion that we didn’t give him and imagine the sad face on his supporters?
Now, maybe you can argue that Democrats were in too weak a position to give him less than a billion dollars and/or get anything in return. That’s like saying that a Little League team is too weak to defeat the Boston Red Sox. It just means that the Little League team is destined to lose. If the score is 20-2 then maybe they beat expectations, but they still lost.
Except a $1.3b commitment for one year is a lot less than a $2b commitment for 10 years, and it’s even less than we spent last year. I mean, you can multiply the $1.3b by ten if you want to, but the law doesn’t. You can make assumptions about what will come later, but they’re assumptions, not facts. On the facts, Dems got a better deal than they originally offered. They won, as did the American people.
And you can assume that the full $20 billion would have been spent regardless of whether Trump is re-elected, and that Democrats would not try to repeat their “win” next year, but I think both assumptions are unreasonable.
Next year around this time we’ll probably be at war with Iran, hosting joint military exercises with North Korea to defend against “South Korean aggression”, implementing some sort of “Books for Guns” policy in schools where the craziest teachers can turn in textbooks for automatic rifles, and handing over all election security duties to Russian-based outfits so I doubt there’ll be a lot of discussion about wanting another $1.3B for the wall.
That’s right, we don’t know anything about the future. Past experiences are no guide at all. Kavanaugh might be a pro-choice hero, for all he’s told us. Let’s just take it easy, accept everything at face value, and see what happens.
We could do that, or we could spend a few days kvetching that the Dems, by actually making an even smaller commitment than they originally offered, and forcing the deal on those terms, are sellout losers.
I don’t think that Democrats are sellouts. Losers yes, but they were dealt a bad hand at a table full of sharks. They did their best, but what do you expect?
Maybe we should feel lucky that we didn’t lose more. And I admit a certain defiant satisfaction that they won’t take away the butterflies. But I’m not exactly in the mood to celebrate. It all reminds me of the joke about the cannibals that ends, “Well, fuck your canoe”.
But privately, Trump has cast the GOP’s dealmaking efforts as inadequate and wondered why he, an experienced dealmaker, wasn’t consulted at more regular intervals as the two sides haggled over an agreement. The White House acted largely on the sidelines while congressional negotiators struck a deal.
90% chance the Supremes overturn an emergency declaration. 10% chance they don’t and President Harris gets to declare an emergency and fund programs for climate chance, health care, and gun control.
Plus, Congress will have to vote on supporting the emergency declaration to build the wall.
We’ve got footage of the Trump policy strategy session where they came up with the idea of:
Signing a bill unpopular with conservatives, and then
Declaring a state of emergency that is unpopular with moderates and independents and everyone to the left of them to
Build a wall that is very unpopular with anyone not in his base, by means that are
Even more widely unpopular than anything else in this list, which will
Be brought up in the House for a vote, and thus force McConnell to do likewise in the Senate, which won’t be politically good for Senate Republicans, and finally all for
A policy that courts will shoot down, will take years to resolve, and will likely never result in any more or less wall being built than is currently going on.
