By Jim Daws
No sooner had the Democrats taken back the majority in the House of Representatives than they proved their harshest critics correct – the party no longer concerns itself with the interests of the American people. And by refusing to provide a dime for a physical barrier on our border, they did it in the starkest terms possible.
Led by far-left Nancy Pelosi, who held off a challenge to her leadership from the even farther left, the House Democrats promptly put themselves in the position of being seen taking the side of foreigners entering the country illegally over the security and economic prosperity of American citizens. They reduced themselves to the absurd position that “walls don’t work.”
I’m not one who necessarily believes that President Trump is a master negotiator or is playing 3D chess. But whether by design or because of pressure from his restive base, he now has the winning hand to build his wall and go on to re-election in 2020.
What’s important now is that Trump plays his winning hand and resists the growing calls from the opposition media and cheap-labor Republicans to compromise with Nancy and Chuck. Doing so would just throw them a lifeline. Instead, Trump should use the power granted presidents by Congress, declare a national emergency, and begin construction of the wall.
Sure, the Democrats and open-border zealots will run to the thoroughly discredited 9th Circuit and get an activist Obama judge to stand the law on its head and issue a bogus restraining order. But the president will be on solid legal footing, and that ruling will be overturned by the Supreme Court on the expedited basis that an emergency declaration demands.
It took a while for them to admit it, but even liberal legal scholars now grudgingly recognize that the National Emergencies Act of 1976 grants the president the authority to reprogram military construction funds for emergency projects. And sorry, CNN, but it’s the president and the president alone who decides what’s an emergency. The Secure Fence Act passed by Congress in 2006 further strengthens Trump’s case for declaring an emergency.
This will put the Dems in the awkward position of arguing that wasteful Army Corps of Engineer projects in Iraq and Afghanistan are more important than one protecting America’s border. While many of those projects were of dubious value to begin with, many more have already been built, have been destroyed, and are waiting to be rebuilt to be destroyed again.
While all this plays out, the Democrats will be all over the opposition media, declaring Trump a tyrant for having the audacity to secure the nation’s borders. It will be Trump Derangement Syndrome on parade as one wild-eyed leftist after another vehemently argues against what Americans can plainly see is common sense.
Trump’s greatest value is as a disruptor, and all this disruption is just too delicious, as it forces the Dems to play their losing hand.
While Trump should quickly end the partial government shutdown to take away that issue, he shouldn’t give an inch on DACA or any other form of amnesty. Doing that would muddy the waters and fracture his base and congressional Republicans. That argument can wait for another day and for more substantial concessions from the Democrats like an end to chain migration. In the meantime, let the Dems twist in the wind.
This would also be a good time for the administration to get its communications act together and correct several fallacies the opposition media have ingrained into the public’s consciousness – fallacies like that the wall is an exorbitant expense, when in reality it will save far more through reduced costs associated with illegal immigration, which currently costs the nation well over $150B each and every year. Heck, it will save money on the reduced need for border patrol personnel alone. Then there is the fallacy that a 2,000-mile border barrier is some major engineering challenge, when the U.S. has built over 46,000 miles of interstate highways, each mile of which required more complex engineering than setting a steel-bollard wall. And there is the self-obvious fallacy that agenda-driven politicians, open-borders advocates, and opposition media pundits know more about how to secure the border than border patrol agents who overwhelmingly are calling for a physical barrier.
Having regained one house of Congress, the Democrats immediately boxed themselves into a losing position. That position is in opposition to the main issue that elected Trump to the presidency: securing the border. Their fellow travelers in the media can deceive the uninformed portion of the electorate for only so long before it becomes painfully clear that voting for Democrats imperils the nation.
Even if he uses some kind of executive action and they sue, it will keep the issue alive and in the public eye.