Will Trump Really Declare a National Emergency to Build the Wall?
While fielding questions from reporters in the Rose Garden last week, President Trump floated the idea of circumventing Congress and using the military to build his long-promise border wall. “We can call a national emergency because of the security,” he said. “I haven’t done it. I may do it. But we can call a national emergency and build it very quickly.”
If anyone doubted the president was serious, several outlets have since reported that the White House has been discussing the prospect. Negotiations to resolve the issue and re-open the government have not been going well, with Democrats steadfastly refusing to include border-wall funding in a spending bill and Trump refusing to accept a bill that does not include over $5 billion of taxpayer money allocated toward its construction, which could ultimately cost as much as $70 billion. Something has to give. “We can only stay like this for so long,” a White House official told CNN on Saturday. Bringing the military into the picture may seem ridiculous and implausible, but then again so did shutting down the government.
On Monday morning, Trump tweeted something Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) said Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopolous in an attempt to legitimize a potential national emergency declaration.
Link to tweet
What Trump conveniently didn’t include in his tweet was the second part of Smith’s quote. “In this case, I think the president would be wide open to a court challenge saying, ‘Where is the emergency?’ You have to establish that in order to do this,” he told ABC on Sunday. “But beyond that, this would be a terrible use of Department of Defense dollars.”
Smith isn’t the only lawmaker to question the legality of Trump’s scheme to follow through on his biggest campaign promise. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told MSNBC on Sunday that the president “absolutely does not have the authority” to declare a national emergency in service of building a border, adding that it seems to him that if there’s any national emergency it’s “because of the individual who’s sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Sen. Jeff Merkely (D-OR) agrees. “The law is very specific about a declaration of war, about the type of threat that’s posed to the United States,” he told CNN on Monday. “Realize that in the year 2000, there were 200,000 people at peak coming to our border, 200,000. We’re at about a fifth of that right now. So how could this possibly be framed as a national emergency?”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-national-emergency-border-wall-775804/
= new reply since forum marked as read
“Realize that in the year 2000, there were 200,000 people at peak coming to our border, 200,000. We’re at about a fifth of that right now. So how could this possibly be framed as a national emergency?”
And it wasn't considered an emergency even then.
