Trump’s emergency declaration puts GOP in a bind

WASHINGTON — Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., spent the past two weeks hammering out a deal on federal spending and border security with colleagues from both parties, reassured by a sense that Congress was finally asserting itself as a civil, stabilizing force.

The feeling did not last. On Friday, President Trump mounted one of the most serious executive branch challenges to congressional authority in decades, circumventing Congress with an emergency declaration. It would allow him to unilaterally divert billions of dollars to a border wall and presented his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, who labored on a legislative compromise, with the excruciating choice of either defending their institution or bowing to his whims.

The president’s move left Senate Republicans sharply divided, and it remains to be seen whether they will act collectively to try to stop Trump or how far into unchartered territory they are willing to follow a headstrong president operating with no road map beyond his own demands.

“With him you always have to expect the unexpected,” Capito said.

The Republican resistance to Trump’s emergency declaration was much more pronounced in the Senate than in the House, where a few Republicans — in the minority but more closely aligned to Trump — groused. But most of the conservative rank and file embraced it.

After threatening to kill the spending compromise needed to keep the government open, Trump opted to cite a national emergency to pry loose additional funding to build a wall longer than the 55 miles in the bipartisan agreement. It was the divisive step that Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, Capito and most other Republicans in the Senate had forcefully urged him not to take, because it would establish a precedent they feared future Democratic presidents would use against them.

The decision left McConnell, a professed guardian of the Senate’s prerogatives and power, joining with Trump in supporting an executive branch end run greater than any of the incursions into the legislative process he often accused President Barack Obama of pursuing. Fellow senators said McConnell was unhappy with the declaration, but saw it as the only way to pass the spending bill.

Some top Republicans, led by McConnell, pivoted quickly to say they supported the president’s action because it was the only option left to him after Congress failed to meet his demands for wall funding.

Other Republicans portrayed it as a gross violation of the constitutional separation of powers, a blatant disregard by the president for Congress’ fundamental role in determining how federal dollars are spent.

“He is usurping congressional authority,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. “If the president can reallocate for his purposes billions of dollars in federal funding that Congress has approved for specific purposes and have been signed into law, that has the potential to render the appropriations process meaningless.”

Several other Senate Republicans publicly and privately joined Collins in describing the move as a flagrant breach of congressional jurisdiction and a dangerous precedent. Their numbers raised the clear possibility that enough Republican defectors could join with Senate Democrats to provide a majority to disapprove of the president’s decision should the opportunity arise.

Four Republicans might be enough to join with Senate Democrats and pass legislation rebuking the president, and leadership aides put the number of potential defectors as high as 10. But the unrest seemed well short of the sort of party-wide revolt necessary to override a veto by Trump of any legislative attempt to prevent his declaration of an emergency, leaving a legal challenge as the only recourse.

Democrats were united in their condemnation, accusing Trump of claiming a false crisis because he could not win over Congress with his argument.

Carl Hulse and Glenn Thrush are New York Times writers.