Looks like Trump had to cave after all.
3-week temporary end to shutdown. TSA's getting paid.
There's really no way, I think, that even
he can frame this as a victory. Right now he's getting burned from all sides - Coulter is calling him the biggest wimp in the history of the GOP (supplanting HW in her mind). The bill that will pass is the one that sailed through the Senate unanimously back in December, and the one the Dems have passed through Congress
three times this month. He shut the government down for a month for
literally no gain. In that time his approval rating, as well as that of the Republican party have fallen precipitously. He and the Republican leadership will try (and are certainly trying now) to play this off as a good compromise and progress towards "actual negotiation," but they all know this was a colossal cock-up.
Meanwhile, let's all take a moment to acknowledge that this was a major victory for organized labor. There was, realistically, no chance of this extension happening, essentially, until the assorted airline workers' unions started talking about a general strike, and the FAA started shutting down airports and grounding flights. One can only imagine the sort of hell Trump would have caught had those strikes actually happened and, for instance, the NFL had to consider postponing the Superbowl. Strikes work and unions work, people! It's the only thing those in power will actually respond to.
Now, the real question is what happens on the week of 2/14. Trump in his Rose Garden address seemed, once again, to float the idea of declaring a National Emergency to get the wall built if he still can't bring the Dems to the table. However, as has already been noted, there's no way that declaration goes even 12 hours without getting slapped with an immediate injunction from a Circuit Court, and, however craven 5/9ths of SCOTUS is to the Republican agenda, they at least have the foresight to recognize that investing the Presidency with that kind of power can only backfire on them catastrophically the instant the Dems get one of their own into the White House.
The Wall is simply not worth going to the wall over in the eyes of the Republican leadership when, say, a future President Harris or Warren or what have you could use that same language and declare a National Emergency on unwanted pregnancies and use eminent domain declarations and emergency funding to start building abortion centers
en masse, or declare a national healthcare emergency and start implementing some sort of
ad hoc universal healthcare initiative. They already saw the way Bush's expansion of presidential authority opened the door for Obama, I doubt they're cool with letting something like that happen again.
But then again, this
is a more conservative version of the SCOTUS that made the
Citizens United ruling, so who knows.
I figure Trump wants immigration to remain an issue, getting his wall would put it on the back burner.
