It would literally be a constitutional crisis if he tries to force himself in there to give the speech. He'll just give the speech in the Senate chamber, the oval office or at a MAGA rally.

And the next time I'm in Washington I'll toss a flower on the grave of the recently deceased Sergeant of Arms.

Well if there's one thing we can count on, it's that our President will do the sensible and prudent thing.

My first thought would just be to kick out the cameras or block their view so that it can't be broadcast... or have Nancy give a speech at that time, forcing him to physically remove her if he wants to address the chamber.

This could backfire on the Dems though because 99% of people don't realize that the SOTU speech isn't required to be in the house of representatives, isn't required to be in speech form and that Trump needs to be formally invited by the House to attend and he can't just stroll in there if they rescind the invitation.

So the narrative could turn into "OBSTRUCTIONIST DEMS WON'T LET THE PRESIDENT DO HIS JOB!!!!"

But if Pelosi doesn't want him to give the speech there, he can't give it. The literal mechanism of the speech is a special joint session of congress so if she doesn't pass the resolution to approve it, congress won't meet. And she can even turn off the lights, cameras, close the house chamber, etc.

This is the dumbest Constitutional crisis ever.

That's a good point. I'd also add that the pressure is going to be cranked up exponentially in a couple days when workers miss their second paycheck, and if that doesn't end it, the next paycheck another two weeks down the line cranks the pressure up that much more. It could conceivably go up by an order of magnitude at that point.

However, if they do that, it could be a great wedge issue. If the Dems pass something in the House that Trump says he'll sign and McConnell won't let it to the floor for a vote, that looks horrible for the GOP and the party could splinter on the issue.

The issue here is, once Democrats start negotiating around the shutdown, they could begin to own it. I think this was a viable strategy at the beginning, but now that they've taken the "No hostage taking, period," stance, they have to stick to it.

I think you may underestimate the degree to which Trump's base would view citizenship for Dreamers as a huge loss for him. They consider it amnesty and unacceptable. They want to kick Dreamers/DACA out for good, they loathe them. Ann Coulter was shredding him after his speech the other day in which he offered 700,000 DACA recipients a 3-year reprieve and no path to citizenship.

Keep in mind as well that there are 3.6 million Dreamers, and only around 700,000 enrolled in DACA, and we'd be dealing for immediate citizenship for all 3.6 million. Trump's base would be apoplectic.

That's also probably adding a net gain of 500K to a million Democratic votes in 2020. My best guess would be that about 600-650K Dreamers live in Texas, so if you turn out half of them and win two-thirds of that, you just gained around 100,000 votes in Texas. That's probably a conservative estimate... Beto lost by 215K. Using similar estimates, you might gain 40-50K votes in Arizona. Hillary lost by 91,000 and Sinema won by 56,000.

Now, I'm not saying Democrats should pursue this policy for electoral reasons... They should do so because it's the morally right thing to do. But it certainly has electoral benefits, and that's part of the reason the GOP is so against it and part of the reason we should consider it a pretty big win...

The only way we're going to get citizenship for Dreamers on better terms than this sort of a deal is by having a super majority in the Senate.

I agree, and I actually think this was a misstep for Pelosi - it seems like trolling for the sake of trolling, and as much as I enjoy pissing him off, so far I don't think it's helped us very much. I'm guessing the play was just to try to piss him off and trigger him into doing something massively stupid, but he hasn't taken the bait that much... Cancelling the codel was stupid, but it's not the kind of thing 95% of Americans care about one iota.

I'm thinking the correct play is to let him do it and get Pelosi to make a speech before in someway to the look, we didn't want him taking another tantrum & punishing more of the public.... Fling in a few slurs that his base recognises that she's trying to get them paid, but the billionaire doesn't care for them, try to turn the tables on him.

I still stand by my hot take that making him give the SOTUA now with the shutdown going on is great optics for the Dems. Why delay it?

Now we have the additional problem that Nancy’s power move might trigger a for real Constitutional crisis. She cannot back down here without undermining the entire legislative branch. This was really not a great play.

Welcome to our (UK) world.

Democrats are going to look into Kushners and Flynns security clearances +

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...tics-live-news

Well, he hasn't grabbed a mace.

I thought CSPAN had the only cameras in the chamber and shared the feed with other stations, didn't Ryan catch **** for shutting off the cameras last year while dems live streamed some protest?

How come USA#1 doesn’t have a cool mace?

Don't know about Ryan doing that, but I know she'd catch a lot of **** for blocking them or turning them off and I was opposed to this move from the start despite enjoying the LOLs. I was just pointing out a power that she had to block him, not necessarily endorsing that move.

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/polit...ned/index.html

This seems like a big deal.

Isn't it obstruction of justice to threaten witnesses?

Don't worry, it does.

Giuliani Brain: What's happening to Trump is actually INjustice, so obstructing it is good.

Folks,

We already have walls, triple-walls in some locations. These walls are environmental disasters and monuments to r-word-ism. All you West Wing types, who wanna leverage policy mumbo-jumbo by trading X for Y should simply be ashamed of yourselves.

These new walls need to be opposed flat-out under any circumstances. If funded, they need to be obstructed using direct action. No compromise.

Also, WTF with the Donkeys?

Allegedly they are on the side of labor (lol, but that's what they say). The obvious, immediate, and proper strategy should be encouraging the workers working without pay to quit doing that shiz. Shut it Down !!!1! That would solve this problem easily within a week.

There's no negotiating on this, in Trump's mind anything but $5.7 billion for his wall means he lost the deal, which means he won't accept it.

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