No shortage of overreach
In voting against President Trump's declaration of a national emergency along the southern border, many of the dozen U.S. Senate Republicans who did so said they had concerns about executive overreach. They're well founded, and not just at the federal level.
Former President Barack Obama took things into his own hands numerous times during his eight years in office after failing to persuade Congress to pass policy initiatives he favored. The topics included environmental regulations, recess appointments and immigration.
Democrats in Congress had no problem with those, which makes their criticism of Trump's border declaration ring more than a little hollow. More substantive were comments by Republicans who were willing to risk Trump's considerable ire by rejecting his idea.
The declaration would allow Trump to take billions that Congress has appropriated for other reasons and use it instead for a border wall. Many of the GOP senators who voted against the plan favor stronger border security, but not this way.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, called it “a constitutional question … a question about the balance of power that is core to our Constitution.” Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said the Senate was “waking up a little bit to our responsibilities.”
Oklahoma's senators, Republicans Jim Inhofe of Tulsa and James Lankford of Oklahoma City, voted with the president. They have said they believe as Trump does that the flow of people entering the country constitutes a crisis. They surely would have heard from angry constituents if they had bucked the president on this issue, but they occupy safe seats and wouldn't have been hurt much politically.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, on the other hand, is considered vulnerable in 2020 but voted to rescind the president's declaration. Ultimately, Collins said, “I feel my job is to stand up for the Constitution, so let the chips fall where they may.”
Meantime, newly elected California Gov. Gavin Newsom is taking some well-deserved criticism for overreach of his own. Newsom recently announced that no executions will be carried out while he is governor. If any execution dates occur during his tenure, he plans to use his gubernatorial reprieve authority to automatically grant a commutation.
“I cannot sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings,” said Newsom, a Democrat.
His move is a direct rebuke to Californians who in 2016 voted against abolishing capital punishment and approved a proposal to speed up the appeals process.
National Review noted that it's reasonable for Newsom to have been disappointed by that result. But, the magazine's editors wrote, “It is not reasonable, however, for Newsom to seek to undermine that result in its entirety.”
They're right. At all levels of government, regardless of party, the rules are meant to be followed — not simply changed by fiat when someone doesn't like them.