Governing by Owning the Libs

04 September 19 It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Governing by Owning the Libs Tom Scocca, Slate Scocca writes: "Fine: Donald Trump wanted to buy Greenland, or at least wanted to talk about wanting to buy Greenland. Presidents are allowed to be silly and imperialist; taking over Greenland is mild stuff compared with, say, planting a flag on the moon." EXCERPT:  In the permanent campaign rally, the point of governing is to let everyone know who’s who. This is why Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services and another figure whose taste for partisan warfare predates Trump, gloated on Twitter about the work his office was doing to block immigration, writing “the best is yet to come!” It’s why when pressed about the poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, the tired and the poor and so on, he disavowed the message—just as Stephen Miller, the baleful engineer of the administration’s anti-immigrant machinery, had disavowed it two years before. The ruling party has no use for the Statue of Liberty, because the Statue of Liberty is understood to belong to everyone.  This has been developing for a long time: Next year will be the 25th anniversary of the government shutdown led by Newt Gingrich, when the speaker of the House decided it was better to disable the day-to-day operations of the country than to cooperate with a Democratic president. At the time, it was understood to be a showdown between one governing agenda and another. In the intervening years, though, the deed itself became the point, an act of pure negation. By 2013, when the Tea Party and Ted Cruz shut down the government, the purpose was simply to sabotage the Affordable Care Act—not to produce any alternative policy but to try to use control of a single house of Congress to nullify what had already been made law.  Some might have gullibly taken the Tea Party for a group with identifiable policy priorities. But the Tea Party yelled about fiscal restraint because it wanted to restrain a Democratic president from being able to spend money. When a Republican got back into the White House, the budgetary restraint went away.  Opposition was the only principle. Eventually, inexorably, this led to the moment that Mitch McConnell simply refused to consider any Supreme Court nominee Barack Obama might nominate—followed by John McCain, the mascot of old-fashioned statesmanship and civility, declaring his intention to block any nomination that might be made by a President Hillary Clinton, as well. The alternative to a Republican justice would be no justice at all.  And a broken government is better than a shared one. In Trump, the party has found a figure who frees it from even pretending to care about running the country. Where the George W. Bush administration boasted that “when we act, we create our own reality,” the Trump administration dispenses with action and reality alike. Every decision or announcement or tweet is pure antagonism, a boast of a win built on taunting the losers. By the time anyone tries to figure out what happened—whether the wording of the executive order makes legal sense, or the draft memo ever came to be, or where anybody put the detained babies—the president has gotten bored and moved on. The insight of Donald Trump and the people around him, then, is that the spirit of negation is not just for obstructing what your opponents want to do, but can extend to the entire project of being in charge of the government.  If you’re weak enough to care, by the way, the Federal Election Commission just joined the list of disabled institutions, with one of its four existing commissioners—out of a body that’s supposed to have six—resigning at the end of August. That leaves it without a quorum and therefore unable to enforce election law. The vacancies are there because the Trump administration abandoned the traditional practice of filling the seats two at a time, by naming one Republican and one Democratic nominee. Instead it submitted a single name, a former Trump campaign lawyer. The libs have been owned.  READ MORE Summer Zervos, center, has sued President Trump for defamation in a New York State court. (photo: Jefferson Siegel/Sipa/AP) It's Not Over: Trump Is Stalked by Investigations He Tried to Stonewall David R. Lurie, The Daily Beast Lurie writes: "With all the focus on how a largely symbolic impeachment might affect Donald Trump's re-election prospects, numerous investigations and lawsuits concerning the president and his associates seem to have dropped off the political radar. But they are still going - and could affect the result of the next election." READ MORE Afghanistan. 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