THE HIGHEST STAKES EVER

Yes, we have reason to believe that Vladimir Putin's Russia manipulated the American election in 2016 to get Donald Trump into the White House. Yes, we have reason to believe that Donald J. Trump is an agent of the Russian government. However, Robert Mueller and other U. S. Attorneys are investigating those allegations and will have more definitive information for us in the near future. What is far more dangerous both for the long and short term survival of American Democracy is the current government shut-down. Please let me explain.

In the closing days of the 114th Congress in December, 2018 the U. S. Senate passed a funding bill that would have kept all Departments of the U. S. Government operating. The bill did not contain funding for a wall along the border with Mexico though it did significantly increase funding for security along the southern border. At that point the bill was going to receive a positive vote in the U. S. House of Representatives and Donald Trump was set to sign the bill.

However, at that very point the American Volkishe Biobachter, Fox News, and the most strident of the neo-Fascists including Rash Lamebrain and the odious Ann Coulter latched onto the absence of wall funding. They made an issue of it by insinuating that Trump was impotent if he didn't insist on his wall. With his fragile virility on the line Trump stated that he couldn't sign the bill in its current form and the spineless Speaker Paul Ryan never brought the funding bill up for a floor vote.

We are now in the fourth week of a shut-down of most government services with even essential services suffering all because of a border wall that no one believes will be effective in reducing the number of immigrants coming to the United States, reducing drug trafficking across that border or any of the other wholly fictional or largely counterfactual horrors Trump claims a wall will counter.

The argument is simply over whether a U. S. President must always get his way or not regardless of the effectiveness of the thing the President wants. The corollary to that is that the legislative branch of government must always yield to the whims of the executive.

If Congressional Leaders accede to Trumps bullying demands we have destroyed our democracy. We have a three branch government established by a Constitution to balance and check the excesses of each branch. The executive branch executes the laws passed by the legislative branch and spends the money that the legislative branch appropriates for government activities. The judicial branch interprets the laws in the light of our Constitution as amended and determines whether those laws comport with one another and our stated intentions. No president can deign the building of an outhouse let alone a wall lest it be authorized and funded by the Congress.

Over the last six decades in the shadow of thermonuclear destruction we have ceded many powers to presidents to act in the event of an emergency that renders the normal operations of government impossible. The powers ceded by Congress chiefly have to do with war and the conduct of war. The irrefutable fact is that we are not at war with Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador or any other Central or South American country. Should Congress cave to the whims of Donald Trump in this case it will set a precedent that cedes all power to an imperial president. Our democracy will effectively be over because there will be no checks on executive power any longer.

The Republiscum Party has relentlessly emerged like some vile, misshapen, eldritch deformity from the Republican Party of old to become America's neo-Fascist Party. They believe in nothing other than plutocrats and autocratic strong men or the straw men for autocratic strong men. If we are to remain a true Constitutional democracy we must never give an inch to this insane border wall and the unnecessary and pointless government shut-down that Donald J. Trump's frail ego has visited upon us. No less than our nation is at stake and that even before we deal with Russian intervention in our elections.