Well, House Democrats have formally introduced a resolution aimed at nullifying Donald Trump’s border wall emergency order.
This comes just a week after “your all time favorite President” embarrassed himself on national television in the course of declaring “emergy” during a rambling, highly bizarre press conference in the Rose Garden.
During that lengthy diatribe (which found a visibly irritated Trump weighing in on everything from trade to denuclearization to the stock market), the president adopted a sing-song cadence on the way to detailing just how contentious the legal battle over his declaration was likely to be.
He was right.
By midweek, Trump had been sued by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, by the Center for Biological Diversity in conjunction with the Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Legal Defense Fund and also by California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and the people of Michigan.
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A couple of hours before last Friday’s unhinged press conference, we noted that Congress would likely try to terminate Trump’s “emergency” by taking up a joint resolution. Indeed, Texas Democrat Joaquin Castro had already made it clear that he was prepared to introduce the measure.
“This is a fake emergency,†Castro said, adding that “in the past, presidents have called national emergencies over national security issues or disasters.â€
Fast forward a week and that resolution is reality.
Pelosi called on lawmakers to support the measure yesterday, insisting in a letter that “President Trump’s emergency declaration proclamation undermines the separation of powers and Congress’s power of the purse, a power exclusively reserved by the text of the Constitution to the first branch of government, the Legislative branch, a branch co-equal to the Executive”. She added the following procedural details:
I write to invite all Members of Congress to cosponsor Congressman Joaquin Castro’s privileged resolution to terminate this emergency declaration using the termination mechanism within the National Emergencies Act (NEA), which will be introduced Friday. The House will move swiftly to pass this bill, reporting it out of committee within 15 calendar days and considering it on the Floor within 3 calendar days following that, pursuant to the NEA. After House passage, the resolution will be referred to the Senate and then sent to the President’s desk.
Castro already had 78 co-sponsors by Monday. Now, he’s got 226.
“Since the beginning of his term, President Trump has used national security as a pretext to fulfill ineffective campaign promises and inject fear into the American public,” Castro told CBS, in a statement. “This unfounded declaration would take money away from actual, identified national security needs.”
“What the president is attempting is an unconstitutional power grab,†he said in a subsequent conference call with reporters.
Meanwhile, Schumer will likely put forth something similar in the Senate. As a reminder, these resolutions only need simple majorities to pass. Notably, GOP leaders in the Senate cannot block this from getting a floor vote. Once it passes the House (which it obviously will), it is enshrined in federal law that the Senate must consider the House resolution within 18 days. Schumer will need four Republicans to defect in order to send this to the President’s desk.
And therein lies the problem. As noted last week, the termination measure would have to be signed by Trump himself, barring a two-thirds majority that would override his presumed veto.
A number of Republican lawmakers are not fully onboard with Trump’s power grab. Sen. Ron Johnson has expressed concern, as has Marco Rubio and Susan Collins. “If it’s a ‘clean’ disapproval resolution, I will support it”, Collins said this week. “I think it’s a bad idea”, Rubio told reporters in Miami.
All of this comes amid concern that letting Trump go ahead with this would set a dubious precedent that opens the door to a future Democratic president using similar authority to declare emergencies tied to, for instance, climate change.
Despite knowing ahead of time that this was inevitable, you can expect Trump to feign incredulity on the way to breaking his own land speed record for angry tweets and conjuring new derisive nicknames for any Republicans who dare support a resolution aimed at nullifying his contrived crisis.
The timing here is hilarious. It looks to me like the votes will overlap with the Kim summit, the beginning of the debt ceiling drama and, potentially, William Barr’s deliberations on what to do with the Mueller report.
Stay tuned, “the ratings will be tremendous.”
They can sue me all they like. I has the best lawyers. I’ll take every last cent these &^&%^ers have. Believe me. My emergycy is the best there has ever been. It will go down in history. You can quote me on that.
If the full Congress passes this resolution, but fails to override the veto, I wonder if the Supreme Court will take that to mean that Congress really doesn’t mind the declaration or usurpation of power. Ideally, the Supreme Court should nullify the National Emergency Act as unconstitutional delegation of power.
Time to rebrand “national emergency”?