The legal question will come down to intent.
For a fleeting moment on Friday morning, a wild hope galloped through my mind like a horse fleeing a barn fire. Trump would step to the podium to make his emergency declaration, smirk at the assembled reporters and say, “My fellow Americans, I have never told a joke in my life.” With a sudden howl, he would rip the rubber mask off his head to reveal a man everyone thought was dead. I knew it! It’s Andy Kaufman! Behind him, Mike Pence would tear his mask off to reveal Jerry Lawler, and the two would walk away arm in arm giggling like titmice on a tree bough, having pulled the greatest prank of all time.
If you’re going to cause a constitutional crisis, you may as well make it fun, right?
Nope. When Trump unleashed a disorganized, rambling, snarling, sniff-riddled word cloud on China, Korea, Syria, missiles, Obama, wars, duct tape, “bob” wire, Democrats, singsong Beat poetry, caravans and the stock market while announcing his illegal emergency declaration, it wasn’t fun. It was surreal to the point of brown-acid psychedelia, and it was perfectly terrifying in the main, but it wasn’t fun. In an administration made of low points, Friday’s Rose Garden debacle was a Jules Verne novel on live television. Dead or alive, Andy Kaufman would have been a substantial improvement.
So that happened, as Trump said on Friday, and here we are. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell jettisoned the last lingering threads of his integrity and endorsed the emergency declaration on Thursday afternoon, likely because he’s also getting the shutdown-avoiding border bill he wanted. With McConnell now on board, a majority of the lemmings in his caucus — many of whom are deeply concerned about the precedent being set — will likely fling themselves over the cliff if House Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Joaquin Castro force a vote on the declaration, which they are all but certain to do.
It will be a hot political mess for the Republicans, but Trump’s declaration will probably survive a congressional assault. Even if a bill to thwart the declaration manages to pass both chambers, there will almost certainly not be enough Republican votes to override a veto.
