I really can't get all that sweaty and hysterical about President Donald Trump adding to the wall on the Southern border and declaring a national emergency to fund that wall.
As a conservative, I should tell you that Trump is wrong. And the 12 Senate Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing his declaration for a national emergency are correct.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who is supporting Trump, is wrong, although he was kind to his Republican colleagues who dissed the president.
"The president will prevail," insisted Graham. "I don't think for a moment they're not sincere, I just disagree with their analysis. We're gonna keep building the wall."
You keep on building, Senator, and you'll probably make the border stronger.
But you'll likely make the republic weaker.
Because who knows what kinds of other national emergencies future presidents might declare?
That's the worry.
And if it weakens the republic, it threatens our liberty. Because the republic is what keeps us free. The republic guarantees individual liberty and the Electoral College, and without that, we might as well decide everything by immediate popular vote and the rule of the mob and have the left coasts run the show.
That's when the Hunger Games begin in the Midwest, I suppose.
The republic needs Congress to do its job. And Congress hasn't done its job. The federal bureaucracy, like the bureaucratic eunuchs of the old, decrepit Ottoman Empire, has primacy.
And the people don't know it. Congress must stand up for itself and take responsibility and write laws again, not just provide license for regulators to make law.
As the son of immigrants, I understand the need for strong borders. A nation without strong borders isn't a nation, it's just ripe territory. Democrats understood this too, once, before they played politics with immigration. There's been too much cynical immigration politics on both sides of the political divide -- Republicans seeking cheap labor, Democrats seeking new votes.
Still, a president going around Congress to get what he wants is not the right way to do things.
That's being a political boss. That's not the American Way. That's the Chicago Way.
Democrats and their media pals didn't complain all that much when the Chicago Way president himself, Barack Obama, announced, "I've got a pen and a phone."
Obama played the boss of bosses. He didn't need Congress. He had that federal administrative state, his regulators, his pen, his phone and that million-dollar smile.
So please, Democrats, spare us the hysteria. This is politics at a most shaky time for the republic, and it's not all Trump's doing.
But politics is what worries me.
Politics is unpredictable. You never know what will happen.
Who besides me said publicly -- eight months out -- that Hillary Clinton would lose the 2016 election?
The next president might not be Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky or Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. The next president might not even be a creaky old liberal like Joe Biden, who stayed around in politics for so long that he's now considered something of a centrist.
The next president may be someone of the hard-Democratic Socialist left, people once referred to by Chicago Democrats as "those commies."
Now they're legit and running on that Green New Deal. And weird as it may seem, the next president may be of the left.
Perhaps of the soft dilettante left, like the houseplant Beto O'Rourke, or perhaps of the real thing, in Red Bernie.
Bernie would have been the Democratic nominee in 2016 if the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee controlled by Obama hadn't stacked the deck against him with all that corporate money and those superdelegates. What if it is President Bernie?
That's why Trump is wrong. And those who support him on this national emergency business may be hoisted with their own petard. (It's "with," not "on." Trust me, my friends.)
But the rest of us will be hoisted too. And who wants that?
The left isn't religious, religion being the opiate of the people and so on, but the left does have a church. And the high priests and high priestesses of the National Church of Climate Change and their bishops have declared an eternal truth:
We only have 12 years to live anyway.
If you follow the news, then you know that the dogma speaks loudly within them.
And so, with that mindset that we're dead in 12 years, what's to stop Presidente Beto or Bernie from ordering the new Department of Homeland Climate Security from doing something drastic?
Like executing all the farting cows threatening our atmosphere?
Or will Beto -- he won't want a title like "president" -- decide that we've got to do something about all those carbon footprints, and seize all the lump charcoal I keep in my garage?
I need that lump charcoal. I use it for barbecue. And I use it for slow roasting my delicious, lemony, garlicky Greek Easter lamb. Will the government just take it?
They'll have to pry the charcoal from my cold, dead hands.
And what of firearms that I may or may not possess, which is none of your beeswax?
Eventually, we won't have "fake news." We'll have the Ministry of Truth.
A long-lasting republic is a fragile thing and rare, becoming endangered by the willful ignorance of its own people, and the laziness of its legislators to act.
I don't mind a strong wall. But I don't want it done the Chicago Way.
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