National emergency on Thursday’s SACPA menu

American politics will be on the lunch menu on Lethbridge Thursday.

During the regular weekly Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs session, set for noon at the Royal Canadian Legion, speaker James Tagg will present “Is the ability to shutter government services and declare national emergencies being abused by U.S. presidents?”

Tagg joined the University of Lethbridge in 1969. He received his PhD in History from Wayne State University in Michigan in 1973.

For almost 35 years, he taught the sweep of American history, initiated the first southern Alberta history course and helped establish a program in liberal education at the U of L.

United States President Donald Trump recently declared a national emergency without the approval of Congress, in a bid to fund his promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. This came on the heels of signing a bipartisan government spending bill that would prevent another partial government services closure following a historic 35-day shutdown in December and January.

The Republican president’s move, circumventing Congress and legal scrutiny, seeks to make good on a 2016 presidential campaign promise to build a border wall that Trump contends is needed to stop migrants from entering the U.S. and bringing with them crime and drugs.

The speaker will look more broadly at the dysfunctional crisis of American governance and the precedence for this that can be found in American history, ending with special attention being paid to the last 50 years of American governance.

He will also detail some of the constitutional powers afforded U.S. presidents and whether such powers are too often abused in the context of present-day politics and the extreme partisanship dividing democrats and republicans in Congress.