BORDER WALL vs. SEPARATION OF POWERS
Updated: Feb 3, 2019
This dispute is far more than a contest of wills between Pillosi and Trump and between lesser differences in political views. This is emblematic of the tug of war between a president and Congress for domination of one over the other. Leave aside that during the two years Republicans controlled both chambers they could have built Trump's coveted wall, but they didn't; suggesting that they didn't want to fund his wall, for this moment. The deal that Trump apparently made with the Corporate Right Establishment, granting them complete control of the government and our economy in exchange for shielding him from his criminal activities, and, helping him to consolidate support from his radicalized constituency of the self-consumed, has so far enabled him to assert enough blackmail and intimidation against any Republican legislator who might have otherwise disagreed with him, to compel all who wished to remain in Congress to yield to his will. In that respect, the entire Republican Congress is complicit in Trump's crime, right down to aiding and abetting foreign adversaries.
Now, however, as Trump is testing the new House to determine whether they'll all bow down and genuflect before him; as he behaves as if everyone should, he's finding that the House Democrats are not fearful of their constituencies for not bowing and scraping before him, and not yielding to his every whim and will. For someone with such an exaggerated sense of entitlement and as habituated to shouting, "You're Fired," to his every 'whipping boy' at hand when he's having a tantrum, this standoff is infuriating! However, irrespective of one's views around the 'wall' issue, the American Majority has a valid argument when claiming it's immoral to hold the innocent hostage to extract concessions from a third party, the House Democrats in this instance. Further, the House Democrats have a valid point when they claim that caving in to Trump's hostage demands in this instance will only encourage him to use this same tactic whenever he wants something else that the House majority disagrees with.
The infuriating inability to accept that the other branches of government are truly coequal, and that he can not dictate the course and terms of every government action alone, is fundamentally unsettling Trump. His personality conforms to that of the classic dictator, and his pattern of behavior indicates his propensity towards the behavior of a dictator. The world leaders Trump most admires are dictators. It can not go unrecognized that the standoff over the 'wall' is an apparent contest of will between a representative body of the People of a nation, and a trumped up leader who aspires to be a dictator.
