1/11/19
Just how lost is the White House in trying to avoid a humiliating defeat for President Donald Trump in the shutdown showdown? According to Chad Pergram of Fox News, it’s trying to divert disaster-relief funding — intended to cover wildfires in California and hurricanes in Florida, Puerto Rico and Texas — to build Trump’s border wall. It’s hard to convey how self-defeating this would be. The Republican leader in the House, who Trump desperately needs to keep on board, is from California. Diverting money from his constituents to fund the president’s obsession is perhaps the best way to drive him away. Then there’s the Electoral College. No, Puerto Rico doesn’t get to vote, and California is long gone for Republicans. But Florida was one of the closest states for Trump in 2016; losing its 29 electoral votes would mean he’d have virtually no margin of error in the next election. And while he won Texas by a wider margin, Representative Beto O’Rourke’s impressive run for Senate last year suggests that the Lone Star state may be getting more competitive. Sure, the election is 22 months away, and few things a president could do at this point would directly affect what voters do then. But taking away disaster-relief money? We have no idea what kind of electoral effect that would have because no president has ever done anything that stupid.
Now Trump is considering declaring a national emergency. Josh Chafetz correctly notes that doing so would be a retreat, not a victory. It would start a legal battle that would continue beyond 2020, leaving Trump able to blame the courts (rather than his own inept bargaining skills) for failing to achieve his most prominent campaign promise. Unfortunately for him, it has dawned on several Republicans that allowing a president to unilaterally declare a phony emergency any time he disagrees with Congress may not set a great precedent. So it’s not even clear that he can keep a united front willing to pretend the retreat is a glorious win. The funny thing is that, ego aside, it’s unlikely that Trump would actually damage himself if he just agreed to reopen the government while negotiations over the wall dragged on. Sure, anti-immigration folks wouldn’t like it. But most people would forget the whole thing in a few days. The longer this goes on, though, the more people will start suffering real personal harm. And most of them are going to hold Trump responsible.