Trump Is Building a Great Case for His Own Impeachment

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-building-a-great-case-for-his-own-impeachment/

Trump Is Building a Great Case for His Own Impeachment
By William Rivers Pitt,
Truthout
Published
January 11, 2019

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Indeed, the headwinds blowing against Trump’s shutdown are reaching gale force. Furloughed employees marched outside the White House to demand the government be reopened and their jobs restored. Polls taken in Texas show a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the proposed border wall, and those numbers grow even more bleak when the entire nation is asked. No lesser light than Jim Darling, the mayor of McAllen, Texas, where Trump visited on Thursday, believes the border wall and the shutdown are equally preposterous. The only people who really seem to want this thing are Trump, his congressional Republican hostages and the ever-shrinking number of voters who believe all of Trump’s spoken words are immediately carved onto stone tablets.

Do not get your hopes up that Trump is going to walk away from his threats to declare a national emergency, despite the swelling social and political calamity he has unleashed with all this. According to a Thursday afternoon Washington Post report, Trump and his cohorts are still trying to square this particular legal circle, and are even now “laying the groundwork for a declaration of national emergency to build President Trump’s border wall, including searching for unused money in the Army Corps of Engineers budget.”

For the record, “unused money in the Army Corps of Engineers budget” means plundering disaster relief funds meant for Puerto Rico and California to pay for the border wall. And here I thought only vampires drank the blood of the innocent.

The trip to Texas was, as Trump himself groused before departing, nothing but a waste of time. The same can be said for every meeting he has had with congressional Democrats, his prime-time address on Tuesday and indeed the shutdown itself. Everything Trump says and everything he does will continue to be a blatantly harmful waste of time until he finally admits defeat, takes his beating from his base and signs legislation to reopen the federal government.

If he doesn’t, and this thing drags on, the shutdown itself will become an absolute justification for impeachment. Hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers are struggling to make rent and mortgage payments without their paychecks coming in. Our national parks are slowly transforming into Superfund sites due to untended trash and human waste. Food inspections are grinding to a halt, putting the population at large at risk. The national economy will be staggered if the shutdown prevents the IRS from sending people their needed tax refunds. Before much longer, vital services like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will no longer be able to provide food to families in need. Domestic violence shelters will be shuttered and services on Native reservations will cease in abrogation of multiple treaties. This is an abbreviated list.

We are witnessing presidential malpractice on a towering scale. The first death by food poisoning due to uninspected meat, the first person murdered because she could not access a domestic violence shelter, the first reservation resident to die from lack of available medical care, will be the sole responsibility of master dealmaker Trump. Risking the lives of ordinary citizens in pursuit of a narrow political strategy to satisfy the nationalist desires of a sliver of the population is the legal definition of “reckless endangerment.”

It is time for this to end before someone really gets hurt.