Pre-scheduled national emergency

Lauren Clawson of Daily Kos reports that as Congress was completing a deal to fund the government to avoid another shutdown the nasty guy turned against it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to cajole the nasty guy to sign. Instead, the nasty guy told McConnell he wouldn’t sign unless McConnell supported the national emergency declaration to build the border wall.

Which is why the news of the declaration came from McConnell and not the nasty guy.

When I first heard what McConnell said I had lots of thoughts about how he has been avidly becoming the gravedigger of democracy. In this case he’s been played.

Keep in mind: (1) McConnell had previously spoken against the emergency declaration, (2) Congress specifically did not fund the full requested amount for the wall. So this is the nasty guy refusing to abide by the funding law that Congress passed.

Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

That aspiring autocrats can pre-schedule a "national emergency" is the actual national emergency.

When someone thought this authoritarian power grap might lead to the cancellation of the 2020 election. Kendzior replied:

Fascists usually don't call off elections. They hold fake ones to give a contrived sense of legitimacy, with absurd margins like 95% of the vote. For fascists, elections are a performance of power. People should worry more about elections being free and fair than cancellation.

In another tweet Kendzior responds to someone who claims the GOP supports the nasty guy because he can deliver voters.

This take is off. Trump's appeal to GOP wasn't that he'd draw voters. It was that he'd change laws, pack courts, enable corruption and disenfranchise voters to the point that elections lose relevance and GOP can more easily pursue one-party rule and a constitutional convention.

Ari Berman, who wrote a book about the struggle to keep voting rights tweeted:

How democracies die:
Unconstitutional national "emergencies"
Demonizing immigrants & minorities
Attacking free press
Suppressing votes
Extreme gerrymandering
Election interference
Rigging census
Lame duck coups

Let me know if any of those sound familiar.

Speaking of election interference…

Erin Blanco and Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast report:

Two teams of federal officials assembled to fight foreign election interference are being dramatically downsized, according to three current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. And now, those sources say they fear the department won’t prepare adequately for election threats in 2020.

“The clear assessment from the intelligence community is that 2020 is going to be the perfect storm,” said a DHS official familiar with the teams. “We know Russia is going to be engaged. Other state actors have seen the success of Russia and realize the value of disinformation operations. So it’s very curious why the task forces were demoted in the bureaucracy and the leadership has not committed resources to prepare for the 2020 election.”
...
“If the president isn’t interested and there is no strategy, it’s no surprise that DHS is not wasting its time,” said Rosenzweig, now a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. “The failure of the White House to take this seriously is perhaps its single most significant dereliction of duty.”
...
“It’s very clear which direction we’re headed in DHS,” one staffer told The Daily Beast. “Everything, it seems, is dictated by someone higher up the chain who is making it abundantly clear to the rest of us that immigration and border security are the real focuses.”

Perhaps The Onion has it right. We should have protective border fencers.