X is Literally Adolf Hitler, and Also Not-X is Literally Adolf Hitler to Precisely the Same Degree

with a weekly roundup

We’re trapped in a cyclical rollercoaster of political moronization, opening the very same door with our faces over and over again. Thought something that happened was strange and dumb? Great news, you get to live it again. Soon.

Five months ago, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to pay SNAP benefits — that is, to send money to the states so they could load up the nation’s EBT cards so people could buy their government-funded Doritos — even though Congress, playing shutdown theater, hadn’t appropriated money for that program. Here’s what I wrote when that happened:

Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, concludes that people will be harmed if SNAP benefits are not provided, and Congress previously appropriated contingency funds for emergencies in the SNAP program, so there’s no need for current appropriations — the executive branch must use emergency and contingency funds to pay for current operations despite the absence of current appropriations…The courts are demanding that the Executive Branch spend available money without worrying about current congressional appropriations for federal operations.

And once you open that door, I wrote, why would you expect it to close? The executive branch can now appropriate federal funds, a legislative function.

We’re here, now, in the place I said we would end up: shutdown theater, some form of people not getting money from the government that they expected to get, Trump seeing that there’s money in the Treasury, Trump shrugging and saying that we’re just going to go ahead and use the money we know we have. You can read Trump’s March 27 presidential memorandum, “Paying Our Great Transportation Security Administration Officers and Employees,” here. This is the heart of it:

If Democrats in the Congress will not act to honor the service of our TSA officers, who are now performing their critical public safety responsibilities without knowing whether they will be able to buy food for their families or pay their rent, then my Administration will take action. As President of the United States, I have determined that these circumstances constitute an emergency situation compromising the Nation’s security.

Accordingly, I hereby direct the Secretary of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown, consistent with applicable law, including 31 U.S.C. 1301(a).

Democrats, far from complaining that the President of the United States has just granted himself the power of the purse, are scoring idiotic points by denouncing him for not doing it sooner.

And so on.

So the people who have been screaming at you that Donald Trump is an aspiring authoritarian who is ushering in FASCISM IN AMERICA also denounce the same Mean Orange Hitler for failing to govern through unilateral executive action often and quickly enough. He needs to defer to Congress to respect our constitutional system and obey the limits on his power, and also he needs to just go around Congress and spend money on whatever. He’s a cruel authoritarian who needs to exercise more authority without waiting for the legislative branch to say it’s okay. I just tried to diagram the logic, and my brain leaked out my ears. That mean authoritarian should have appropriated federal funds through executive orders the first day Congress chose to not appropriate those funds.

The Democratic Party has no meaning or value. They perform outrage on all days ending in -y, under all circumstances, and would perform precisely the same outrage noises under precisely the opposite of the conditions that cause them to perform outrage noises. They pursue no principle, organize around no logic but mindless and relentless opposition.

Structurally, they keep putting themselves out of a job. The president can and must pay SNAP benefits and TSA wages without waiting for Congress to tell him to spend federal funds that way. So…what does Congress do? If the executive branch can ignore congressional inaction and just spend the money anyway, and the critics in the opposition party just denounce him for not doing it sooner, why does he ever need to wait for Congress again? The mindless opposition against Trump’s authoritarianism is creating authoritarian precedents. The president just has to pay for things, even if Congress doesn’t say to do that. I think it’s becoming pretty hard to overstate how pathetic and dysfunctional our political discourse has become, and I forget how long ago I started saying that America is falling into a Congress-sized hole. That institutional collapse seems to be accelerating.

At the Federalist this week, I wrote about a March 26 Census Bureau report showing a sharp drop in immigration (especially illegal immigration) into the United States: “Illegal Immigration Is Way Down, So Naturally The Media Are Freaking Out.” There’s some discussion in this one about implications that the legacy media somehow missed.

I also wrote about research on childhood gender crisis, and the growing clarity of the fact that most kids just grow out of it if you leave them alone: “‘Trans Kids’ Is A Dying Trend.”

Ignore the headline, because this one is mostly my commentary on Robert Mueller, but I compare him to other figures: “James Talarico Is Just The Latest Of The Media’s Pathetic Cardboard Heroes.”

And I wrote this one at the beginning of the week, under a self-explanatory headline: “Democrats Have Nothing To Offer But Fear And Misery.”

The war in Iran seems to be transitioning into an…interesting new phase, and I hope to get into that discussion in the days ahead. As always, thanks for reading.