Trump Reportedly Drafting Emergency Declaration for Border Wall

Because of course he is. Nancy Cook at Politico reports:

The White House is finalizing details of a potential national emergency declaration to secure [Donald] Trump's border wall, even as lawmakers are trying to broker an immigration deal that could avert another shutdown in just over two weeks.

Trump met with his budget chief, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, and other top officials, including White House lawyers, on Tuesday to walk through the logistics of such a move. And White House aides have been quietly meeting with outside conservative political groups to build support for the president to take such an action. Those talking points, which emphasize Trump's legal authority, have begun to show up in such conservative media outlets as Breitbart News.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvers indicate that the administration wants to be poised to quickly declare a national emergency, should Trump choose to do so, by the time Congress hits its Feb. 15 deadline to strike a deal before government funding again runs out. And it signals that White House officials may not have much faith in congressional Republicans to secure the funding in the coming weeks that Trump seeks to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump himself has said the odds of a congressional deal are "less than 50-50."

One senior White House official told Politico the goal is to have such a declaration 100 percent ready and coordinated should Trump decide to move on it rather than scrambling ex post facto to draw up and justify one.

Anyone who's been paying the slightest bit of attention to how Trump works already assumed that Trump and his White House gremlins were getting their emergency declaration ready in the likely event that Congress didn't come up with a deal that funded his monument to nativist white supremacy. But here is confirmation of what we were all anticipating.

What absolute wrecks of humanity these men are, planning to shut down the government again over this malicious horseshit. I would say "despite the vast harm the last shutdown caused," but it's not despite. Malice is the agenda.

And once again I will register my fury that Jared Kushner is still free to shape horrendous national policy, even though it is public knowledge that he broke federal law multiple times by lying on his required financial disclosure forms. (Never mind what federal investigators have turned up on him.) That he still hasn't been removed from his position is incomprehensible to me.

Back in May of last year, when Kushner was granted his permanent security clearance, I wrote: "Something I and others, including and especially my friend Sarah Kendzior, have noted is that Jared Kushner is a litmus test both for how effectively the nation's checks and balances are keeping kleptocracy at bay and also for the urgency and efficacy of Mueller's investigation. As long as Kushner, who has demonstrably broken federal law by lying on disclosure forms, retains a job in the White House, we should all be very concerned about the potential for meaningful accountability, from any source."

Here we are, eight months later, and Kushner is still empowered to make decisions that will affect the lives of millions of people.

Trump should be removed from office, but that will be very difficult. Removing his son-in-law would not be difficult at all. So we really need to wonder why it is that it hasn't happened.