Trump Will Have Have His ‘National Emergency’ After All

As expected, Donald Trump is going to sign the spending bill agreed to on Monday by the bipartisan group of lawmakers who were given the decidedly unenviable task of cobbling together a border security deal that was some semblance of agreeable to Republicans and Democrats alike and that had a faint hope of winning approval from the fickle beast who occupies the Oval Office.

While the committee did manage to strike a compromise allowing Congress to put something on the table that could in theory avert another government shutdown, the bill only allotted $1.375 billion for border barriers. As noted here on any number of occasions this week, it’s by no means clear that the funding can accurately be described as “wall money”, much to Trump’s chagrin.

Given the massive discrepancy between that $1.375 billion figure and the $5.7 billion Trump continues to insist is necessary for the construction of what he, as recently as Tuesday, continued to describe as a “big, beautiful wall”, it was inevitable that he would move to divert money from other projects (including, possibly, disaster relief funds) in order to try and bridge the gap.

All week long, the president expressed his disdain for the deal, and in a series of pseudo-threats delivered at various intervals, proclaimed that he will “build the wall one way or another.”

His raucous rally in El Paso (which featured “Finish The Wall” banners hung from the rafters) only underscored the notion that Trump is hell-bent on procuring more than Congress is willing to give when it comes to his vanity project.

Read more

Trump ‘Not Happy’ With Bipartisan Shutdown Deal, May ‘Let China Slide’ On Trade Deadline

It probably doesn’t help (from the perspective of stoking the presidential fire) that the media continues to point out that under Trump, zero new miles of border barrier have been constructed. In other words: his claim that “massive amounts of wall have already been built” is not only misleading, it is as far away from the truth as “massive” is from “zero”. If you can quantify “massive”, you can put a number on how big of a lie Trump is telling when he says he’s already “built a lot of wall”.

Given the above, the only question was whether Trump would go through with a national emergency declaration once the spending bill was signed (because not signing the spending bill would mean another shutdown and it sounds like the GOP has told him, in no uncertain terms, that refusing to endorse the deal would come with severe blowback on Capitol Hill, even from Republicans).

Some GOP lawmakers were holding out hope that Trump wouldn’t ultimately go the national emergency route. The optics would be bad and it will be a legal nightmare.

Well, on Thursday afternoon, Mitch McConnell said that he had spoken to Trump and while the president is indeed prepared to sign the bill, he will “declare a national emergency at the same time.”

Here is the moment when McConnell delivered the news (once Chuck Grassley was done screaming):

The White House would subsequently confirm. Here’s what Sarah Sanders had to offer, in a statement:

President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action – including a national emergency – to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border. The President is once again delivering on his promise to build the wall, protect the border, and secure our great country.

Nancy Pelosi has already said she may move to file a legal challenge.

So there you have it. It appears America is going to get Trump’s long-rumored (and overtly farcical) national emergency declaration. If the draft that CNN got its hands on a few weeks ago is still accurate, it will begin like this:

The massive amount of aliens who unlawfully enter the United States each day is a direct threat to the safety and security of our nation and constitutes a national emergency.

Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C 1601, et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States.

You can look forward to a veritable deluge of media coverage aimed at exposing exactly where the diverted funds are coming from and, more to the point, what won’t be funded with any money Trump steers towards the wall.

For now, we’ll leave you with what we said on Wednesday:

How many times as [Trump] said “one way or another” in the context of that wall over the past month? He’s said it repeatedly. Which means if he does go ahead with some kind of emergency declaration or dubious end-around in an effort to get more funding, nobody has a claim on being incredulous.