Tesseracts wrote:I've taken 3 airplanes recently and I need to take another one to get back home :(.
On the extremely dim bright side, depending on how bad security is, you might be able to a take a plane home with you without anyone noticing. Seriously, though, hopefully everything turns out well.
Absentia wrote:Part of the reason nobody in Washington is optimistic about this cluster ending anytime soon is that no one can figure out what Trump actually wants to do.
I think Trump might try to use that to his advantage. I could easily see him complaining his demands weren't unreasonable and claiming people misrepresented what he wanted, since it's not clear to anyone what he's asking for now. He's already using his ambiguity as a political cudgel. Trump switches between saying "wall" and "barrier" and now says it could be concrete or steel. It seems to me that based on the inclusion of the steel option, he's claiming that Democrats basically voted for his wall idea in the past. They have voted for fencing, but it certainly wasn't to block the entire border, nor did past presidents seek to build the ginormous concrete wall (that Trump once said could be as high as 95 stories) that Trump originally promised and continued to promise for a couple of years.
In the last few days he has gone back and forth and even contradicted himself in the same sentence on whether he intends to declare a state of emergency and use military funds currently earmarked for future disaster relief to build his wall. As of this morning the answer seems to be "no," possibly because he can't find a lawyer to tell him that he has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a court challenge.
I agree, but I also wonder if he's biding his time because he can't convincingly make the case for declaring a national emergency.
Maybe he'll use the fact that this is now the longest shutdown U.S. history to bolster the argument that it's an emergency. Of course it wouldn't make sense because he's the reason the government is shut down, but since when has he cared about making sense? (To clarify, I place most of the onus on Trump because the Senate unanimously passed a spending bill that didn't include border wall funding, and the House seemed prepared to approve it as well before the Trump backtracked and said no). Maybe some bombshell revelation about Russia will come out and he'll declare an emergency. Or maybe he'll keep the shutdown going until next month and declare an emergency right before on the the day when Michael Cohen appears before Congress.