“No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state or with a foreign power or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.”
Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution.
Yep, anything is possible in the grate state of Texas… including a Uvalde gunslinger with a semiautomatic assault rifle shooting children while good ole Texas cops stand outside waiting for orders, a Valentine’s week (2021) deep freeze as almost all of Texas loses power from a standalone power grid suffering from Texas cheap “deferred maintenance,” to sending busloads and planeloads of Venezuelan asylum-seekers (seeking escape from the repression of a left-wing dictator) to blue states for care, all to teach them blue state lefties a lesson, Texas style.
Even though most of the larger cities in Texas are blue, they have each been gerrymandered with deep stems into neighboring White or right-wing Brown surrounding suburbs to marginalize their majority blue voters. Texas is otherwise a purple state that votes redder than a stoplight. So, it cannot be a big surprise that right-wing autocratic Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, seems to have found a way effectively to declare war and deploy military forces… with a unilateral interpretation that the aggregation of asylum seekers on our southern border, which extends equally to blue New Mexico and blue California, constitutes a bona fide “border invasion.” Give me a big “yee haw,” and pass me a piece of that barbequed brisket!
On November 14th, President… er… Governor Abbott took “unprecedented measures” and prepared to deploy the Texas National Guard to repel that on-going “border invasion.” It was a nice press release, and Abbott made sure to let the various border counties in Texas know what he was planning. Apparently and joyfully usurping power normally relegated solely to the legislative and executive branches of the federal government – effectively border control, immigration and the right to deploy and control military forces against such “invaders” – Greggy-boy was also using his Vanderbilt law degree expertise to usurp the federal judicial branch to interpret the US Constitution himself.
Texas must be so lucky to have such a multifaceted governor… one who can consolidate all those branches of government under his personal control. I forget. What do we call a government leader who believes that all that power belongs exclusively to him? Debra Cassens Weiss, writing for the November 17th Journal of the American Bar Associates, tells us more: “Abbott also plans to build a border wall in multiple counties, deploy gun boats, enter into a compact with other states to secure the border, and ‘enter into agreements with foreign powers to enhance border security.’… Abbott first authorized the National Guard and Texas police to act in July, directing them to return immigrants to ports of entry. He also referenced the invasion clause at the time.
“Joseph Nunn, counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, called the invasion clause approach ‘flagrantly unlawful’ in a post that he wrote for Just Security in July. He made a similar point in a tweet thread responding to Abbott’s latest announcement.
“Nunn said Texas was not ‘actually invaded’ and was not in ‘such imminent danger as will not admit of delay’… ‘Even if Texas were being invaded,” Nunn tweeted, ‘that would not permanently transfer any authority over national security from the president to the governor of Texas. At most, U.S. states have the power to mount an initial defense to a sudden invasion. They may not fight a war.’
“Nunn said Abbott’s actions were actually ‘a thinly veiled effort to take the reins on U.S. immigration policy.’ But that would also be unconstitutional under U.S. Supreme Court precedent holding that immigration policy is ‘unquestionably’ and ‘exclusively’ a federal power, Nunn said.” Even the rogue Trump configured US Supreme Court. Those well-armed invaders just might use explosive tamales and IED-tacos in their assault on Texas. Oh, they don’t eat tacos and tamales in Venezuela. My bad.
That we have not been able to generate a solid Congressional immigration reform bill since Ronald Reagan – with right-wing Republicans blocking even the efforts of their own GOP president (George W Bush), in addition to Democratic presidential efforts, ever since – seems irrelevant to this “my way or the highway” GOP congressional bloc. They prefer to blame Democrats for it all, no matter their own complicity in the problem. If that reform were passed, they would no longer have anyone to blame. And I am sorry Greggy-boy, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ right wing efforts seem to out-Trump even yours!
I’m Peter Dekom, and there is absolutely nothing remotely on the visible horizon that suggests that Congress will even try to tackle this border/immigration issue that has festered for over a third of a century without any progress at all.
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