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President Trump hasn’t seen legislation cross his desk that he didn’t like in his first two years in the Oval Office. That is likely going to change next week when the Senate votes on a bill that would limit the President’s national emergency declaration on the border crisis.
The move made last month in response to a government shutdown and a failure by Congress to negotiate a spending bill that sufficiently funded the border wall has been a point of controversy every since his Rose Garden press conference announcing the declaration. Most Republicans have supported the declaration, but a handful in the House and now an ally in the Senate could force the President to use his first veto.
Senator Rand Paul will join Senatos Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, and Susan Collins in voting in favor of the bill that would reverse the national emergency declaration.
Fourth Republican will vote to block Trump emergency declaration, giving resolution enough support to pass Senate https://t.co/DZ69vUNzkd pic.twitter.com/cmb3rvrjNP
— The Hill (@thehill) March 3, 2019
My Take
As we have said on multiple occasions, failure by Congress to fund the wall should never have resulted in national emergency declaration in the first place. The President could have started building the wall with 10 U.S.C. 284 alone, bypassing the need for a national emergency declaration and not giving Congress grounds for overreach. This provision in the U.S. Code specifically addresses building a border wall for the sake of helping law enforcement against drug smugglers and transnational organized crime.
It wouldn’t have been enough to get the whole project going the way the President wanted, but at the very least it could have gotten the ball rolling, period. As it stands, we’re not going to get much wall at all before the 2020 elections. This was a tremendous miscalculation by those advising the President.
It will be the administration’s biggest failure, even bigger than failing to repeal Obamacare, if they can’t get a significant amount of wall built before the election. Whoever is advising the President needs to stop doing the Democrats’ bidding.
Covid variant BA.5 is spreading. It appears milder but much more contagious and evades natural immunity. Best to boost your immune system with new Z-Dtox and Z-Stack nutraceuticals from our dear friend, the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko.