Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 11m 36s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred eighty-eighth day.
On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt presents his Four Freedoms goals during his State of the Union address.
Recommended for reading in full:
Trump has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the partial shutdown of the federal government:
Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Peter Baker report The Border Wall: How a Potent Symbol Is Now Boxing Trump In:
Before it became the chief sticking point in a government shutdown drama that threatens to consume his presidency at a critical moment, President Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southwestern border was a memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.
As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.
“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled telling Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser. “We’re going to get him to talk about he’s going to build a wall.”
Talk Mr. Trump did, and the line drew rapturous cheers from conservative audiences, thrilling the candidate and soon becoming a staple of campaign speeches. Chants of “Build the wall!” echoed through arenas throughout the country.
(Disturbingly funny: Trump’s advisors had so little respect for his intellectual ability that they fed him a simple word and idea to repeat again and again. Yet, Trump’s advisors, themselves, had so little ability that they failed to grasp that he’d believe literally in the rhetorical trope they gave him.)
Bruce Ackerman writes No, Trump Cannot Declare an ‘Emergency’ to Build His Wall (“If he did, and used soldiers to build it, they would all be committing a federal crime”):
The Supreme Court’s 1953 decision in Youngstown v. Sawyer would be critical in Congressional consideration of such a decision. In a canonical opinion by Justice Robert Jackson, the court invalidated President Truman’s attempt in 1952 to use his powers as commander in chief to nationalize steel mills in the face of labor strikes. The decision imposed fundamental constitutional limits on the president’s power to claim that a national emergency — in this case, the Korean War — allowed him to override express provisions preventing him from using those powers domestically.
….
What this all adds up to is a potential crisis much graver than whatever immigration emergencies the president has in mind: A legally ignorant president forcing our troops to choose between his commands and the rule of law in a petty political struggle over a domestic political question.