A lawless act. A gross abuse of power. A desperate attempt to distract from a broken political promise. This is how the Democrats formally described President Trump’s threat to use federal emergency powers to fund a border wall – shortly after signing a spending bill that was negotiated to avert a second government shutdown. Trump’s decision seemed to arise from his annoyance at receiving only US$1.375 billion, for a mere 55 miles of border fencing, rather than the US$5.7 billion that he wanted.
The fight over the wall, or fence, is part of a larger showdown. The compromise spending bill – which ran to more than 1,000 pages – also sought to force Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain fewer immigrants: 40,000 – down from the current rate of more than 45,000. In fact the administration wanted authorization for up 52,000 detentions and several Republicans act as though ICE could still do so, if needed. As with the drawn out battle for wall-funding, the lavish funding for ICE has become a tussle between the executive branch of the US government – which is attempting to rule by fiat – and the legislative branch, which is using its control of public money to rein in the president.
A CBS poll found two-thirds of the public opposed to the use of emergency powers, but Trump will likely ignore this if the right cable TV hosts praise him for being decisive. Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats will try to strip Trump of his emergency powers. These are notoriously broad for a democratic country – used by Franklin Roosevelt to detain Japanese Americans during World War II, and by George W. Bush to authorize illegal surveillance and torture. Any Congressional measure to rein in Trump’s emergency powers will fail without Senate approval – or it could be vetoed by the president. Should that happen, it will provoke a constitutional crisis that would ultimately be resolved by a right-leaning Supreme Court. This is likely to return both parties full circle to the standoff which created the recent shutdown.
America’s unravelling institutions are symptomatic of a disappearing political consensus. There is little common ground between the two main parties and what remains is shrinking fast. Nowhere is the divide more evident than in the media that rival camps consume, each with its shrill denunciations of the other side. Furthermore the rash of what is now called ‘fake news’ has undermined confidence in the media generally. In November 2016 the Oxford Internet Project examined the use of Twitter in the run-up to the American election. It found that substantive journalism and ‘junk news’ were circulated online on a roughly one-to-one basis. Since then – in large part due to the president’s indiscriminate sharing of whatever partisan tidbit catches his eye – that ratio has increased quite considerably.
The loss of shared facts and the consensus that these used to enable has deepened America’s political divide. It has turned issues like border security into articles of faith rather than questions of public policy. For depending on the sources of your information, Trump is either bravely securing a threatened homeland or insisting on a ridiculous, unnecessary and impractical solution to a contrived crisis. Neither interpretation disposes its adherents to genuine political compromise.
Trump’s willingness to improvise solutions to every political crisis has revealed the hollowness not only of the Republican Party, but of many of America’s key institutions. As one crisis bleeds into another, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how any of it will be resolved without further inflaming the country’s hyperpartisanship and producing ever greater executive and legislative dysfunctions.
