Conservatives, like Lee and The Week’s Ed Morrissey, argue that Congress shares a good deal of blame for the current national emergency situation because it has steadily ceded power to the executive branch for decades, and that is true. It would seem in the best interest of constitutionally conservative Republicans to take a stand here. But if they don’t, there is one final remedy: elections. And the next president, whether elected in 2020 or 2024, should destroy any wall Trump constructs in this manner — and announce the intention to do so publicly, so Trump will know what’s coming, and so will the courts and the soldiers or contractors who build it.
You could view this proposal as a call to waste even more taxpayer dollars to own Trump, to castrate his vanity project, leaving a pile of rubble to embarrass him and show him that, as is written in Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Or in the transition from the band Kansas: In the end, “all we are is dust in the wind.”
But this is about more than that. Much more. It’s about protecting America’s grand experiment in government, which the founders placed upon three legs, expecting each one to jealously guard its given powers. And it’s also about raging against the dying light of Reagan’s shining city upon a hill.
