By unilaterally appropriating funds for a border wall that Congress has repeatedly declined to provide, Trump is striking at the constitutional order itself.
The political fallout from that first government shutdown boxed Trump in; to avoid more damage, he has agreed to a bill that makes a mockery of his otherwise-defensible claim that illegal Third World immigration is an emergency.
Rather than owning his political miscalculations and vowing to win back a majority for border control at the ballot box, Trump has decided to evade the constitutional process for government appropriations and make his own laws.
The National Emergencies Act, under which Trump has casually declared his funding intentions for the wall-"Whether it's $8 billion, $2 billion, or $1.5 billion, it's going to build a lot of wall"-is intended to grant the executive additional powers to respond to fast-moving crises, usually of a foreign nature.
For Trump to use an emergency power to do what Congress has refused to do violates the most fundamental of the Constitution's checks and balances.
"We're going to control the national security crisis on our southern border and we're going to do it one way or the other," Trump said after Congress passed the gargantuan spending bill on Thursday.
If we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump's emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world.
https://www.city-journal.org/trump-national-emergency-border-wall
The political fallout from that first government shutdown boxed Trump in; to avoid more damage, he has agreed to a bill that makes a mockery of his otherwise-defensible claim that illegal Third World immigration is an emergency.
Rather than owning his political miscalculations and vowing to win back a majority for border control at the ballot box, Trump has decided to evade the constitutional process for government appropriations and make his own laws.
The National Emergencies Act, under which Trump has casually declared his funding intentions for the wall-"Whether it's $8 billion, $2 billion, or $1.5 billion, it's going to build a lot of wall"-is intended to grant the executive additional powers to respond to fast-moving crises, usually of a foreign nature.
For Trump to use an emergency power to do what Congress has refused to do violates the most fundamental of the Constitution's checks and balances.
"We're going to control the national security crisis on our southern border and we're going to do it one way or the other," Trump said after Congress passed the gargantuan spending bill on Thursday.
If we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump's emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world.
https://www.city-journal.org/trump-national-emergency-border-wall
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