Pity that the American system does not envisage the possibility of a vote of confidence to take down a government that is not up to scratch. There is, however, a silver lining in that the replacement (Pence) could well be worse for the future of the American Experiment.

What a sad little whimper of a ‘presidential address’ it turned out to be. I give him another week, two tops.

It looks like he’s planning to use tonight’s PR moment to immediately declare his “emergency”. Some Right Wing AM Radio guys (like Beck’s clan) are openly hoping he will somehow threaten the country and the Congress by telling them they have 7 days or whatever to give him everything he wants or he’ll do it. My thinking is that if he makes such a threat, Pelosi and Schumer should immediately respond with the note that if he attempts this action in 7 days, they’ll begin impeachment proceedings at that time, as well as beginning actions regarding the 25th Amendment.

The Pence White House does not seem to understand how weak their position here is. The reality should become clearer by the end of the week.

Again, maybe I’m completely wrong and Pence’s spokesman will instead apologize to everyone and demonstrate that he’s learned even a single lesson about his pointless attempts to bully the country.

@kevin koster. Cadet Heel Spurs will stay the course for at least the next week or two. Berate Congressional Democrats for being soft on border security. Demand that they pay for his wall. Then when that does not happen, he will unilaterally declare a national emergency. When he tries to appropriate money for his wall, Congress will drag him into court. Under Article I of the Constitution, Congress alone appropriates funds.

It will be fascinating to watch the 5 Repug Justices on the Supreme Court twist and turn to find some legal justification for their President. They will likely succeed with Justice Brett “I don’t black out” Kavanugh writing the 5-4 decision.

I wonder if he’ll use the F-word??

There is a fairly good CNN analysis of what this address is likely to include. Either Pence’s spokesman is going to ramble on with a bunch of nonsense about how Congress must give him the money he previously agreed he did not need, or he’s going to announce that he’s declaring the border situation he invented to now be a “national emergency”. I’m honestly unsure which tact he will take.

Frankly, I’d rather see him take the latter tact – declaring the emergency, since that will mean he can no longer hold nearly a million federal employees hostage and will be compelled to just sign the budget bill the Senate already approved before his tantrum. Because if he doesn’t need the budgetary approval of Congress to take this action, there’s no need to force TSA, Border Patrol and Coast Guard to work without pay, to say nothing of the other hundreds of thousands of public employees currently being held without compensation. And after the employees have begun being paid again, the obvious litigation to come will demonstrate immediately that there is no actual border emergency, and that the Pence White House’s action was taken irrationally – which would potentially open the door to other remedies.

The point of all this is that there is no border emergency – only Trump’s panic that he will not be able to get anyone to pay for his vicious racist middle finger “Wall”. He has no way to compel Mexico to pay for it, and he can’t get Congress to pay for it. And if he tries to just do it anyway, he’ll be stopped in court – something one would think he’d learned his lesson about from his many failures in civilian business catastrophes.

On the other hand, maybe Trump will appear contrite tomorrow night and offer a heartfelt humble apology to the American people, especially those public employees he has disgraced, before backing down on this matter. But his track record does not indicate that this is anything of which he is capable.

The masses will enjoy watching Trumpy suffer a nervous breakdown on the air.

This is abuse of public airwaves. The networks should be ashamed for helping spread lies and propaganda to support Chumps temper tantrum.