Phoney wall, phoney emergency

‘Ididn’t need to do this,’’ President Trump insisted as he declared a national emergency aimed at shaking loose a few billion dollars in financing for his beloved border wall. His assertion was both ludicrous and self-defeating. If a declaration was unnecessary and the wall on track, how could he claim to be addressing an emergency? As Trump explained it, ‘‘But I’d rather do it much faster.’’ A presidential desire for speed does not constitute a crisis – no matter how eager a president is to camouflage his failures.

In defending his declaration, Trump and his team keep asserting that emergency declarations are not unusual. Since 1976, such declarations have been used 59 times. But most have been uncontroversial and involved matters of foreign policy. Declaring an emergency simply because Congress refused to fund the president’s pet project is seen even by members of his own party as setting a dangerous precedent. As Republican Senator Susan Collins warned, ‘‘For the president to use it to repurpose billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated for other purposes and that he has previously signed into law, strikes me as undermining the appropriations process, the vote of Congress and being of dubious constitutionality.’’

Trump betrays no interest in the collateral damage wreaked by his actions. This move will come back to bite him and his party. The question is when, and how hard.