The Pentagon, under orders from Donald Trump, is raiding the cookie jar of money Congress appropriated across the country for projects…
This grab, under the guise, of building more border wall as a ‘national emergency’ is gonna be seen and felt in a lot of Republican districts….
Trump has no regard for the axiom ‘all politics is local’….But Republicans and Democrats across the country rely on it to keep their jobs….(This is n’t the only time this has occurred…Trump’s trade war with China is hurting consumers, farmers and others)
Democrats can run against Trump and the GOPer’s on this….
Republicans have just kept their mouths shut about their party leaders actions…
It COULD cost them dearly in next years elections….
Members of Congress typically work hard to represent their districts. In particular, they try to secure benefits that they can bring home and brag about. Constituents wind up hearing good things about their representatives, and therefore tend to vote for them, all else equal. Thus the advantage of incumbency. In the era of partisan polarization, however, that “all else equal” applies less and less because voters mostly support their party’s candidate, so much so that the incumbency advantage seems to be close to disappearing.
But what happens when incumbents actively support policies that take valuable projects away from their districts? That’s what’s going on with President Donald Trump’s decision to transfer appropriated military funds to pay for his border wall (yes, the one that Mexico was supposed to pay for and that Congress has repeatedly failed to fund).
For now, these transfers appear to be getting plenty of pressin the affected states – including some with potentially vulnerable Republican senators. If this was a normal failure to win funding for projects, I’d say it’s not a big deal; certainly not something that voters would hold against their representatives. But we can’t really say that here. This isn’t a missed opportunity – it’s a deliberate effort to take something away that had previously been secured. Sure, Trump is the one doing it. But it’s not as if Republicans in Congress can say they did everything they could to stop him.
And this is no isolated incident. Trump’s trade wars, which are actively harming domestic industries, are similar. So is his decision to conduct such an extremely partisan presidency that very few people outside the Republican Party think he’s doing a good job….