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President Donald Trump has announced that he will sign the compromise spending bill struck between Democrats and Republicans this week, which will avert another government shutdown and provide $1.375 billion for new barriers along the southern border. Unhappy with that amount—he had requested $5.7 billion from Congress—Trump said on Friday that he will sign a national emergency to access billions more in taxpayer funds for his wall.

“It’s a great thing to do. Because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it’s unacceptable,” he said in a Rose Garden speech. “It’s very simple. We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country.”

Many Democrats, and some Republicans, are alarmed by his daring attempt to further expand presidential power. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who is running for president, called the declaration an “outrageous abuse of power.” Another 2020 candidate, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, took it a step further:

Every time a president declares a "national emergency" in order to get his way on a particular issue, the closer we are to a dictatorship. Who needs Congress or the people if the president can make the decision on issues by himself? Very dangerous precedent.

Trump’s declaration does not reflect any sort of Reichstag fire moment. He is not suspending the Constitution or the rule of law. But it’s certainly an unprecedented move. Past presidents have typically invoked emergency powers in good faith, and in ways that Congress intended—in response to terrorism or overseas conflicts, for instance. Trump is doing so purely for political gain, to show his flagging base of supporters that he’s serious about fulfilling his signature campaign promise—even as polls show that a majority of Americans oppose the wall and the idea of declaring a national emergency to build it.

Trump insists that the situation at the southern border constitutes a “national security crisis,” but the facts don’t support his justification for declaring a state of emergency. Border crossings have been in steady decline for more than a decade, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than American-born citizens, most drugs are smuggled into the U.S. through or near legal ports of entry. If Trump really cared about stopping the illegal drug trade, he wouldn’t reportedly be plundering $2.5 billion from the Defense Department’s drug interdiction program as part of his executive gambit to secure more wall funding.

Trump has now set the stage for yet another grueling slugfest in the courts. He’s thrown Senate Republicans in politically treacherous waters by forcing them to choose between the public’s antipathy towards the wall and the GOP base’s enthusiastic support for it. And he’s set a precedent that may allow Democrats to achieve key policy goals without the Senate’s consent the next time they take the White House.

First, Trump’s declaration will likely have little practical impact in the short term. Legal challenges could place the wall funding in limbo for months or even years, like virtually every other major unilateral policy initiative rolled out by the administration. “Did I ever say I was filing a legal challenge?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday. “I may. That’s an option. And we’ll review our options.” A federal appeals court allowed House Democrats to intervene in an Obamacare-related case earlier that day. Even if Democrats or other plaintiffs don’t prevail in the end, delays in the lower courts could effectively run out the clock before the 2020 elections.

We’ve been here before, most notably with the travel ban. His executive order to bar visa applicants from a several Muslim-majority countries went through three iterations before the Supreme Court signed off on it last June. It’s impossible to know whether the justices would also approve Trump’s state of emergency. Much would depend on the exact legal circumstances of the case, including who brought it and the grounds on which they challenged the declaration. No matter whether they win or lose, Democrats would likely reap some long-term benefits.

Let’s imagine that the Supreme Court strikes down the declaration. Perhaps the justices decide that Trump didn’t act in response to a genuine national emergency, because border crossings have been declining for almost 20 years. Perhaps they decide that the National Emergencies Act of 1976 delegated too much of Congress’ power to the executive branch. In either case, a ruling that constrained the executive branch’s discretion would be welcome under Trump and beyond. Many of Trump’s worst policies—the travel ban, the family-separation policy, and more—came from broadly worded legislation by Congress. Lawmakers should change that approach to lawmaking, and a nudge from the justices wouldn’t hurt.

If, on the other hand, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues give their blessing to Trump’s maneuver, then Democrats would gain new tools to advance their agenda next time they control the White House. It’s not impossible to imagine a President Elizabeth Warren or a President Kamala Harris declaring that climate change is a national emergency, and diverting military funds toward civil works that would mitigate it. Declaring an emergency probably wouldn’t allow Democrats to enact the entire Green New Deal or Medicare for All. But it could be a useful way to get around the threat of a Senate filibuster.

Pelosi hinted at such opportunities in her comments to reporters on Thursday. “Let’s talk about today, the one-year anniversary of another manifestation of the epidemic of gun violence in America,” she said, referencing the school shooting in Parkland, Florida last year. “That’s a national emergency. Why don’t you declare that emergency, Mr. President? I wish you would. But a Democratic president can do that. Democratic presidents can declare emergencies as well. So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by Republicans.”

Indeed, unease and dismay is an apt description for how some Senate Republicans have responded to the news. “I don’t believe that’s the way we should do these sorts of things,” Florida Senator Marco Rubio told reporters on Thursday. “I actually think there’s a real constitutional question about it.” Maine Senator Susan Collins complained that the move “undermines the role of Congress,” while Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said he was “not in favor of operating government by national emergency.”

They’ll have a chance to demonstrate their views more directly soon. Thanks to the National Emergencies Act, House Democrats can put Senate Republicans on the spot: The House has the power to pass a resolution overriding the president’s declaration, and the Senate must approve or reject it; even a vote to not consider the motion would count as de facto approval of it. These complications are why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell previously urged Trump not to declare a state of emergency. An override may well pass the Senate, and if so, Trump would be forced to issue his first veto as president—overruling some prominent members of his own party in order to build an unpopular wall.

So why did McConnell relent and declare his support for the president’s plan to declare a national emergency? Trump reportedly had last-minute apprehensions about signing the compromise spending bill, even though a veto would have triggered another partial government shutdown for which Republicans would bear the blame. McConnell could not risk that, and likely was unable to change Trump’s mind about the emergency declaration. This is the perfect encapsulation of the ruling Republican Party today: an uncompromising president who inflicts long-term damage to avoid the short-term humiliation, and a spineless leader of the Senate who stands by him every step of the way.

Documentary Now! is television for people who love movies—more specifically, documentary films. This may be a growing niche. Documentary has undergone something of a renaissance in the last ten years, as streaming platforms have focused on bingeable nonfiction films and series that spark detailed, intense debate: Did Robert Durst really murder his wife? Did the stress of captivity really make a killer whale attack its trainer? Was Ma Anand Sheela—the charismatic spokeswoman for the Rajneesh cult in Oregon—truly a sinister leader or just a woman in way over her head? Documentaries have the power to rocket a story directly into the news, serving viewers a portion of life to dissect, examine, start Reddit threads about, and watch on repeat.


A quirky comedy series now entering its third season on IFC, Documentary Now! picks apart these films in a different way. Instead of breaking down the information they present, it scrutinizes their style, offering up laser-accurate parodies of famous works. Each episode re-creates a movie, down to its camera angles and costumery, and can highlight not only the brilliance of lauded documentaries but also their shortcomings. This nerdy, often delightful concept is the brainchild of Saturday Night Live alumni Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers, and director Rhys Thomas, along with the intrepid cinematographer and director Alex Buono, who has the uncanny ability to mimic the visual style of films from any era.


Helen Mirren, a real sport, introduces every parody as part of a PBS-like showcase for the “world’s most thought-provoking cinema.” The conceit is that these invented documentaries are as magnificent as the films they are aping: The Thin Blue Line, Grey Gardens, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The War Room. But as the episodes grow increasingly absurd, the documentary form starts to look quite loopy too. Suddenly, you are wondering why the Maysles brothers decided to spend weeks following around two women who live in squalor. And was that an exploitative act, or the stuff of epic cinema? What Documentary Now! is doing, in a subtle way, is probing the idea of greatness. Why do certain films, and filmmakers, get to become part of the canon?


The best of these episodes can forever change the way you watch the source material. Sometimes, you want to run back to the original with a newfound swelling of appreciation. “Final Transmission,” for instance, pays homage to Talking Heads’ 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense, fondly quoting bassist Tina Weymouth’s blond, shaggy hairstyle and David Byrne’s oversize business suit. Other episodes reveal holes in work you previously admired. “Parker Gail’s Location Is Everything” puts a dark twist on Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme’s 1987 film about the performance artist Spalding Gray and his elaborate monologues; Hader plays him as a misogynist fabulist, who can’t stop warping the truth, inventing anecdotes about a pushy girlfriend and about encountering a wise woman in the subway, who tells him “you’ll get where you need to go.”


The main creative team behind Documentary Now! is all men, which means that they mostly choose documentaries with male subjects to spoof: The Kid Stays in the Picture, Salesman, History of the Eagles. The scarcity of episodes with a woman at the center is disappointing—I long for them to parody 20 Feet From Stardom—but it does result in quite a few instances of both Hader and Armisen openly dissecting and critiquing patriarchal systems from the inside. Making a documentary can be an act of intrusion and manipulation as much as it can be an act of responsibility and care, and Documentary Now! investigates just how thin that line can be.


In the show’s third season, its tone has shifted. For one thing, Bill Hader, who clearly loved the movies he lampooned, does not appear in these episodes; he is off making the second season of Barry, his HBO comedy series about a hitman who aspires to be an actor. Without him, the season has a harder edge: It doesn’t just gently rib its subjects, it eviscerates them.


In “Long Gone,” the season’s sixth episode, Fred Armisen plays an aging jazz musician named Rex Logan in a smoky, black-and-white re-creation of Bruce Weber’s 1988 film about Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost. The original film was a near-sycophantic love letter to a jazz legend, presenting Baker as a cool cat who traveled with the wind, floating through hazy noir shots of cosmopolitan streets at night. “Long Gone” is far more sinister: Armisen plays a self-centered and dissociative musician, who at one point decides to abandon his wife (Natasha Lyonne) and child to live in a tiny European country and gets mixed up with a fascist dictatorship. The episode attempts to grapple with the men behind the original movie. Chet Baker was a libertine and an addict, and Weber has experienced a reputational reckoning of his own, after recent accusations of sexual misconduct. (Weber is challenging the accusations.) But the episode is weighed down with mea culpas and dramatic lighting, and never makes a really coherent political statement.


One finds the same sloggy heaviness in “Batsh*t Valley,” a two-episode arc that parodies last year’s breakout Netflix series Wild Wild Country (with a dash of The Source Family, the 2012 documentary about a New Age cult in 1970s Los Angeles). Owen Wilson does a guest-turn as the charismatic leader of a religious group that takes over a small town in Oregon in the 1980s, just as the Indian mystic Rajneesh and his followers did. The episode drags because it doesn’t bring a fresh gag to the proceedings; it simply replicates the story of Wild Wild Country, with a few added jokes about the FBI and vegan cuisine. When Documentary Now! shines, it does so because its fake films raise new questions about the real documentaries. I ended my viewing of “Batsh*t Valley” with nothing new to believe.


The third season, however, brings two standout episodes, both dominated by women. Renee Elise Goldsberry and Paula Pell star in “Original Cast Album: Co-op,” a parody of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary about the cast recording session for Sondheim’s Company. The comedian John Mulaney co-wrote the episode, along with several brand-new show tunes, which so closely resemble Sondheim’s rapid-patter style that I had to pause my viewing several times because I was laughing so hard. Goldsberry is brilliant as an ingenue who belts out a number about 1970s interior decoration, celebrating the colors beige and brown, and Pell does a spot-on tribute to Elaine Stritch. It is clear that everyone involved with the episode is having fun making it. How could they not? They are performing an entirely fictitious Broadway musical in period costumes straight out of Taxi Driver.


But the episode from this season that I will re-watch, and that deepened my engagement with the documentary form, is “Waiting for the Artist,” in which Cate Blanchett guest-stars as the performance artist Izabella Barta. Blanchett perfectly captures an essence of Marina Abramovic, who allowed a crew to follow her as she staged her MoMA retrospective for the 2012 film The Artist Is Present. The self-aggrandizing mission statements, the anxiety meltdowns as the show nears, the abstruse declarations about the purpose of performance art—Blanchett mimics all of these. Famous Barta pieces include “Gender Roles on Spin Cycle,” in which she sits inside an industrial dryer; “Domesticated,” in which she drinks from a bowl of milk on the floor while she screams “I am human!” over and over to a cat; and “Ein Tag, Ein Frankfurter,” in which she eats only one hot dog, very slowly, every day for a year as a way to process a breakup.


These pieces seem absurd, but no more than many that Abramovic really staged throughout her career. Consider “Carrying the Skeleton,” in which she hoisted a skeleton on her back and walked around with it as a way to show that she was confronting grief. In her real MoMA show, Abramovic sat in a gallery of the museum all day, allowing members of the public to sit across from her and experience her presence. Many cried, or said they had spiritual revelations. In Documentary Now!, Blanchett stages the same sort of experience, except it takes place in a sculpture of a public bathroom, in which patrons pass toilet paper to her underneath a stall (many cry, many have spiritual revelations). It is not that the episode doesn’t take performance art seriously; it simply suggests that perhaps Abramovic’s work has always been in dialogue with comedy.


In real life, Abramovic often worked with her longtime lover, Ulay. When they broke up, they made the separation official by staging a grand performance of meeting each other to say goodbye in the middle of the Great Wall of China. In “Waiting for the Artist,” Armisen plays the Ulay character, here named Dimo, a provocateur who is constantly trying to take credit for Izabella’s work and admits that he was cheating on her while she was ascetically devoted to her art. Abramovic had an emotional reunion with Ulay in her documentary, when he sat across from her and grabbed her hand in the museum. The parody offers no such closure. Instead, it allows Barta to humiliate Dimo in such a public and emasculating way (which I won’t spoil here) that the episode almost doubles as a radical work of feminist art.


As Blanchett cackles at the episode’s end, I felt grateful for Documentary Now! all over again. I also wondered what the show could become, if in future seasons it featured more episodes devoted to films with a woman at their heart, and also behind the camera. Documentary Now! has done an amazing job of deconstructing the very male, often grandiose world of documentary filmmaking, in which men stomp into the lives of others with a camera for the sake of making art. Now, I would like to see an investigation and acknowledgment of nonfiction shot through a woman’s lens—I’d love to see the show take on Blackfish, or Paris Is Burning, or Whatever Happened, Miss Simone? That’s a reality I would like to binge.  

With all the shouting it was easy to miss, but something new happened in Washington this week. If you can’t see it yet, put yourself back in 2006, when everything about a Somali-American, Muslim congresswoman tweeting a line from a Puff Daddy song—as Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar did Sunday evening—would have been unthinkable.

In March 2006, two established, neo-realist foreign policy wonks named John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published an article in the London Review of Books. They argued that outsized U.S. support for Israel, which receives more U. S. military aid than any other country on the planet, made little sense in a post-Cold War context in which Israel was no longer a “vital strategic asset.” Mearsheimer and Walt attributed the irrational persistence of this policy to highly effective lobbying efforts “to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.” The Israel Lobby, as they called it, was not a cabal or a conspiracy, but something altogether ordinary in Washington, like the gun lobby or the steel lobby: a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations” encompassing Christian evangelicals, neo-conservatives, and the powerful America Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose support or opposition could make or break a candidate. “The bottom line,” they wrote, “is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that U.S. policy towards Israel is not debated there.”

To almost anyone with experience in American electoral politics, Mearsheimer and Walt were stating the obvious: The near unanimity of politicians’ support for Israel resulted not from inborn Zionist sympathies, but rather organizing and influence—which in Washington invariably involves money. The uproar was nonetheless fierce. Pundits lined up to get their kicks in. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The Atlantic, called the two authors “neo-Lindberghians” and characterized Walt as a “grubby Jew-baiter” who “makes his living scapegoating Jews.” David Rothkopf, in Foreign Policy, was only slightly more generous: While Mearsheimer and Walt “may not be anti-Semites themselves,” he allowed, “they made a cynical decision to cash in on anti-Semitism.” Jonathan Chait went after them repeatedly in the pages of The New Republic, dismissing their views as “simply kooky.”

By the time Ilhan Omar walked onto the national stage, a lot had changed, and not much at all. Since 2006, we’ve seen three devastating and overwhelmingly one-sided Israeli assaults on Gaza, the massive expansion of settlements in a brutal and seemingly endless occupation, the collapse of U.S.-sponsored peace negotiations and anything that could be called an Israeli “left,” a widening gulf between Israeli and American Jews, and an Israeli prime minister who went out of his way to embarrass a popular Democratic president and to embrace the neo-fascist right. Ever-larger cracks are appearing in the defensive wall the U.S. media has for years erected around Israel: Critical voices—even Palestinian ones—are increasingly making it into the op-ed pages. Space for debate is finally opening up. And the controversy that blew up around Omar is a foretaste of how bitterly that space will be contested.

It began, of course, on Twitter. Omar and fellow Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib both support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as a response to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. On Sunday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threatened to “take action” against the pair. “This cannot sustain itself,” McCarthy had said, “It’s unacceptable in this country.”

McCarthy did not specify what “it” was, but it was probably not anti-Jewish sentiment that riled him: McCarthy, who last fall dipped into the murky waters of conspiracy theory, tweeting that three prominent wealthy Jews—George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg—should not be allowed to “BUY this election,” seemed to be referring to Omar and Tlaib’s support for BDS. More than any other policy matter, BDS has highlighted both the power that pro-Israel lobbies continue to exert over American politics and their panic at losing it. No fewer than 26 states have passed legislation to punish supporters of the boycott, a nonviolent tactic that citizens have been using for decades—to end apartheid in South Africa, for instance, or segregation on the buses of Jim Crow Montgomery, Alabama. The Senate’s most urgent priority recently after three weeks of crippling shutdown was to pass Marco Rubio’s Combating BDS Act, which lends a federal blessing to state efforts against the boycott.

“It’s stunning,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted Sunday evening, tagging Omar and Tlaib, “how much time U.S. political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.”

“It’s all about the Benjamins,” Omar responded, adding a musical note emoji in reference to the hip-hop lyric. Batya Ungar-Sargon, an editor at the Forward, tweeted to ask Omar whom she was referring to.

“AIPAC,” Omar answered.

That was enough. With five words and one acronym, Omar had, Ungar-Sargon wrote, placed herself in a long tradition of anti-Jewish paranoia, one that “belongs in a Der Stürmer cartoon, not on the Twitterfeed of a U.S. Congresswoman.” The pile-on began. Openly calling out AIPAC and the role of money in securing a pro-Israel consensus was bad enough, but a sinister and anti-Semitic intent even seemed to be imputed to Omar’s reference to “Benjamins,” i.e. hundred-dollar bills. (Benjamin Franklin was very much a goy.)

Nancy Pelosi and the House leadership rebuked Omar. Chuck Schumer jumped in on Twitter, as did Chelsea Clinton. Omar apologized on Monday without exactly backing down, reaffirming “the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics, whether it be AIPAC, the NRA, or the fossil fuel industry.” The following day, President Trump demanded she resign. Mike Pence called for “consequences.” For a minute it seemed like it would be 2006 all over again, only potentially far uglier, since neither Mearsheimer nor Walt wore a hijab.

And then, suddenly, it didn’t anymore. Leftist Jews rushed to Omar’s defense, taking to the pages of the Guardian, Jacobin, and The Nation to declare that Omar was right about AIPAC, and that accusing her of anti-Semitism was opportunistic and absurd. Prominent liberal Jewish commentators refused to join the anti-Omar pile-on. Peter Beinart focused on “the sick double standard” of the attacks on Omar. Her tweets had been “irresponsible,” he wrote, but her “fiercest critics in Congress are guiltier of bigotry than she is.” Rothkopf, who had shown little mercy to Mearsheimer and Walt, tweeted that while Omar’s words had been “ill-considered,” it was “vitally important we distinguish between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism.”* And Jeremy Ben-Ami, chair of AIPAC’s liberal rival J Street, dismissed the whole affair as “overblown,” issuing a statement warning politicians to “refrain from labeling all criticism of Israeli actions or policies as ‘anti-Semitic,’ in a transparent effort to silence legitimate discussion.”

By Wednesday, the story was no longer Omar, but the schism within the Democratic Party that the controversy had revealed. CNN, Slate, Politico, Time, and the The Washington Post all ran stories on the Democrats’ Israel split, pointing out that only one of the seven Democrats vying for the presidency voted for Rubio’s anti-BDS bill, and citing poll after poll finding Democratic voters’ allegiance to Israel slipping.

That story has been developing for years, but what happened in Washington this week was something we haven’t seen before. The imputation of anti-Semitism, an old and much-used tool, was suddenly revealed to be blunt. Critics of Israel have long understood that speaking too loudly would get them silenced and shunned. But Ilhan Omar is still standing. Let the arguing begin.

* An earlier version of this article suggested that David Rothkopf still worked at Foreign Policy. He is now the host of Deep State Radio.