Our picksBorder emergency declaration; hacking Dublin’s tram system; Rep. Steve King’s bigotry, and more

Trump’s advisers push for emergency declaration — while assuming it’ll be stopped in court (Dara Lind, Vox)
They are treating a state of emergency as a get-out-of-shutdown-free card. That is a terrible mistake.

No to an emergency (Editors, National Review)
resident Trump says he is considering declaring an emergency at the border to unlock military funds to build a fence (a.k.a. wall).
It’s not clear how serious he is, although anonymous White House aides have been quoted saying they believe this will be his ultimate way out of the shutdown fight.
It’s a terrible idea. Even if it’s legal — which is unclear, at best — it would represent another unwelcome step in America’s long march toward unilateral government by the executive.
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Legalities aside, this would be a very bad practice. It’s an offense against the spirit of our system for a president to fail to get he wants from Congress — in a dispute involving a core congressional power, spending — and then turn around and exploit a tenuous reading of the law to try to get it anyway.
We know this seems increasingly quaint, especially after President Obama’s pen-and-phone governance in his second term, but we believe presidents have an obligation to honor the role of the respective branches of government, even when it’s not in their political interest, even when there seems to be a clever workaround.
An attempt to spend unilaterally on the fence would almost certainly get tied up in the courts immediately. In the most favorable scenario for the administration, it eventually prevails in a Supreme Court loath to second-guess even dubious military-related determinations by the commander-in-chief. In the meantime, the administration will have built nothing new on the border and created another precedent for unilateral government sure to be exploited the next time a Democrat occupies the White House.

Defenses of Trump’s emergency declaration defy the plain language and clear intent of the law (David French, National Review)
Each abuse builds on the next; hypocrisy builds on hypocrisy.

The real story behind the Havana embassy mystery (Jack Hitt, Vanity Fair)
U.S. officials say dozens of diplomats in Cuba were felled by a sonic “attack.” But the likeliest culprit is far less futuristic—and much more terrifying.