‘I DIDN’T NEED’ EMERGENCY & I’LL PROBABLY LOSE IN COURT
Don undercuts his own ruling, Dems aim to crush it, watchdog immediately sues
President Trump declared a national emergency Friday to secure funding for his longsought border wall but conceded the unprecedented move wasn’t really necessary and that he only made it because he’s impatient, quickly prompting legal challenges and accusations of executive overreach.
“I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” Trump said during a rambling announcement from the White House Rose Garden. “I just want to get it done faster.”
The President formally signed the emergency order a few hours later before jetting off to his private beach club in Florida for a long weekend. He also approved a wall-free government spending package passed by Congress Thursday, averting another shutdown ahead of the Friday midnight funding deadline.
Legal experts almost chuckled in response to Trump’s announcement and argued his poor choice of words proved his declaration is purely political and has nothing to do with national security, as Democrats and government watchdogs geared up to challenge the order in court and in Congress.
“It underscores that he’s really not doing it because this is a national emergency or because he needs to get a wall built quickly,” Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, told the Daily News. “It’s rather to show Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and his base that he’s doing whatever he can to get this done.”
Less than four hours after the Rose Garden announcement, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington became the first entity to file a lawsuit against Trump’s declaration, arguing the Justice Department had failed to back up its legality.
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, announced it was prepping a lawsuit arguing emergency powers can’t be used to “build a border wall” while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (DN.Y.) pledged to introduce a bill in the House together with Texas Democrat Joaquin Castro that would block Trump’s declaration.
“Joaquin Castro and I aren’t going to let the President declare a fake national emergency without a fight,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
Trump even acknowledged his order will likely be struck down in court.
“We will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we will get another bad ruling,” Trump said.
But, banking on loyalty from his conservative appointments to the bench, the President expressed hope the Supreme Court will uphold his dubious declaration.
“Hopefully we will get a fair shake, and we will win the Supreme Court, just like the ban,” Trump said, referencing his self-described Muslim ban, which the high court upheld in a 5-4 decision last year.
Trump’s declaration would free up about $8 billion in taxpayer cash that White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the President could use toward building a wall.
Speaking on a conference call with reporters before Trump’s announcement, Mulvaney stressed none of the money will be allocated from national disaster recovery budgets for Puerto Rico and Texas — as had been speculated that the President was considering doing.
Rather, $1.4 billion would come from the government funding legislation passed by
Congress on Thursday; $2.5 billion would come from a counter-drug provision in the Pentagon budget; $3.6 billion from another Defense Department appropriation earmarked for “military construction projects” and about $600 million from the Treasury Department Forfeiture Fund, according to Mulvaney.
“We should have sufficient money this year to do what we wanted to do,” Mulvaney said, noting the emergency appropriation exceeds Trump’s previous demand of $5.7 billion for the wall he used to promise Mexico would pay for.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said not so fast and called on their Republican colleagues to stand up to “the President’s unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist.”
“This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a joint statement. “The President is not above the law. The Congress cannot let the President shred the Constitution.”
Several rank-and-file Republicans, including Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have ripped Trump’s order as unconstitutional and urged him to reconsider.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Congress, has sided with Trump and claimed Democratic “obstruction” left the President no choice but to declare an emergency.
Tribe, the Harvard professor, countered Trump’s “political stunt” declaration lays a “dangerous precedent for the use of emergency powers.”
He was also flabbergasted how Trump could believe he has a strong case to declare emergency, considering he has undermined his own sense of urgency by dragging out the issue for weeks and allowing the government to be shut down for 35 days earlier this year after Congress refused his demand.
Trump — who claimed in 2014 that President Barack Obama should have been impeached for circumventing Congress by issuing an order protecting some undocumented immigrants from deportation — has shrugged off concerns about his own executive overreach and uses fearmongering rhetoric and inflated statistics to state his case.
“We have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people and it’s unacceptable,” Trump said in his Rose Garden announcement. “We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country.”
The President did not mention that illegal border crossings are down significantly over the past two decades, that a majority of migrants attempting to cross the southern border are seeking asylum after fleeing violence in Central America and that most of the drugs coming into the U.S. through Mexico are smuggled in at legal ports of entry, where a wall would be of no help.
Instead, Trump called bull on his own administration’s statistics that 90% of drugs come through ports of entry.
“It’s just a lie,” Trump said. “It’s all a lie.”