Trump declares National Emergency: Wall must be built... - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14988500
colliric wrote:https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/walls-work-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-build-border-wall-20190216-p50y7j.html

Surprised it took so long for this to appear here. Trump has declared a national emergency over the funding for the wall.

There are some in the media that claim that the way the bill has been worded that Trump may find it difficult to use any of that nearly $1.4 billion to actually build any wall. So he will have to get the money elsewhere. Pelosi hopes to gather enough votes in Congress to disapprove of this national emergency and challenge his attempt to use money allocated for other purposes.
#14988502
He is fooled into trap. Ann Coulter is right here. Jared Kushner must be the first one to be deported. He is toxic waste. Instead draining the swamp, Trump is getting swamped.

Trump could win 2020 easily he could keep government shutdown around for 2 years. This would leave Congress paralyzed for a long time. He could waste Democrats wet dreams.
#14988509
RealClear Politics wrote:She said the president was "fooling the rubes with a national emergency."

"Forget the fact that he’s digging his own grave," Coulter said. "The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot."

"This is the worst open borders the country has ever had under the president who ran against open borders," she said.


Ann Coulter: "The Only National Emergency Is That Our President Is An Idiot"

She's right about both Trump and his target audience. :lol:
#14988514
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1Q420N

So Trump was given $1.3 billion for 55 miles of wall or something, with the national emergency declaration his administration is claiming they can get around $8 billion for over 200 miles of wall.

Although the term "wall" has been debated a bit since it's a tall steel slat "fence" that allows for visibility through it and not a wall in the strictest sense of the term, it doesn't sound like anyone's going to have an easy time penetrating it.

Some questions I have:
(1) How much and which areas of the border will remain unsecured after this is done? 200 miles is certainly a lot and some areas already have walls/secure fencing, other areas are practically impassible naturally, yet the border is over 2,000 miles long. Is this the end or only the beginning?

(2) What about other sources of funding, such as civilians (that GoFundMe thing) or El Chapo's money that we keep hearing about? Apparently El Chapo has enough money for another 400 miles or something.

IMHO Trump is a really good man to go this far to fulfill his campaign promise. I don't get the impression that building the wall was going to be politically tenable, only green projects that never finish but pay out exorbitant amounts to the people who fail to deliver seem to get done these days when you're dealing with leftists. I know I'm getting tangential here but after California scrapped its high speed rail project, it had spent enough money to build dozens of high speed rail lines by the standards being used in other places or countries.

For example, China has a railway system that can take you to pretty much every major city in the country (albeit for sometimes more than a plane ticket would cost but that's another story) yet California can't build one line between two cities while spending multiple times as much money. How on earth was something like rebuilding every building in America (Green New Deal) going to work out if they can't build one railway line between two points? The wall was clearly never going to happen otherwise. Sad!

But also awesome that it's actually being done :) Go Trump!
#14988518
:lol: That you call this obvious loss a win, is hilarious. :lol:

Trump's GoFundMe for the wall is getting close to $20 million. That's about 0.0008% of what he needs to make the wall. :lol:

Trump's rich. he should use his own money for it, if he wants it that badly.
#14988522
Godstud wrote::lol: That you call this obvious loss a win, is hilarious. :lol:

Trump's GoFundMe for the wall is getting close to $20 million. That's about 0.0008% of what he needs to make the wall. :lol:

Trump's rich. he should use his own money for it, if he wants it that badly.


This IS a victory....

He's delibrately headbutting the Democrats here....

The ultimate aim is RE-ELECTION IN 2020. He's making them look internationally like petty obstructionists... It's a time honoured dirty-tactics strategy.

Wouldn't be surprised if his advisors pushed him hard into it.

Ann Coulter has never been a big picture Republican.

Remember his last Campaign dying days slogan.... "It's us versus them"....
#14988523
People dislike Trump because he's earned it. People oppose Trump for his hate spewing, racism and misogynism. He's devoid of ethics and is a conman who lies constantly. Pretending he is otherwise, is delusional.

colliric wrote:This IS a victory....
:lol:
#14988528
colliric wrote:This IS a victory....

He's delibrately headbutting the Democrats here....

The ultimate aim is RE-ELECTION IN 2020. He's making them look internationally like petty obstructionists... It's a time honoured dirty-tactics strategy.

Wouldn't be surprised if his advisors pushed him hard into it.

Ann Coulter has never been a big picture Republican.

Remember his last Campaign dying days slogan.... "It's us versus them"....

The funding bill passed by overwhelming majority in both chambers.

Enough to easily override a veto, hypothetically.

Trump's declaration of emergency isn't going to stand either, is my prediction.

If it does, it will potentially amount to pretty significant changes in that the president can just declare a state of emergency to bypass congress on funding matters, but I don't think it's going to stand.

Article 1 of the Constitution states that it is Congress who appropriates funds. This is clearly unconstitutional, to my understanding. Multiple lawsuits have already been filed, and one is pending by the State of California.
Last edited by Crantag on 16 Feb 2019 14:50, edited 1 time in total.
#14988529
It'll be an interesting SCOTUS case. Obama declared 13 national emergencies or something but nothing to this scale, so there is likely much to debate.

I view it as a win because this is probably the only way to get significant wall funding and building done and now it is happening, when most would have presumed that it would not happen. I'm not very concerned with the amnesty thing, if Ann Coulter et al. actually thought most of these illegal kids were getting deported then they failed to understand the situation. Trump gets blamed for pictures of kids in holding cells that were taken when Obama was President, how is he going to deport a ton of unaccompanied minors? It was never going to happen. On the other hand, sufficient border security can help keep the issue from repeating itself.

Re: the GoFundMe, rumor has it that some extremely wealthy people are willing to donate if it gets the green light, in which case it could be much more than $20 million so far accumulated, which is a significant amount of money.
#14988540
Yesterday Ann Coulter said that the only national emergency we are facing is that Trump is an idiot.

The ice is cracking under him. The news from various investigations is dire. Impeachment is a real possibility. The democrats will want that to happen around the election forcing republican senators to either vote to acquit Trump or face his "base". But can he win?

Maybe but I doubt it. There is a great deal of momentum on the side of the Democrats. There is a real push for a strong woman candidate. I am not sure who that might be. Maybe Warren. Better yet is that Biden runs. He would beat Trump like a cheap drum. So might Beto O'Rourke.

More likely is that the Oligarchs will run the fuck from Starbucks and the usual penchant for Americans to love billionaires will had the election to Trump.

On edit: Trump's emergency declaration just took a shit pot load of money from red state senators. A lot. Taking the money from military building programs royally fucked them out of their hard won pork. It is an interesting cypher but unless McConnell can stop the vote Trump's wall may just be defunded in the legislature.
#14988544
Drlee wrote:Yesterday Ann Coulter said that the only national emergency we are facing is that Trump is an idiot.

He'd be a bigger idiot only if he listened to Coulter. How else could he abandon the issue? Now he's quitting like he's still pushing for the wall. Congress sent him a clear message that he couldn't do another shutdown, maybe because it would be a suicide for him and make 2020 even more terrible for the Republicans than it already looks like.
#14988559
Here’s a decent article on the complexities of the president’s national emergency powers and how they relate to Trump’s declaration by, of all people, the New York Times:

National Emergency Powers and Trump’s Border Wall, Explained

    As the budget standoff between President Trump and congressional Democrats grinds into the third week of a partial government shutdown, the White House has floated the idea that Mr. Trump might invoke emergency powers to build his proposed wall on the Mexican border without lawmakers’ approval.

    That route could resolve the immediate crisis by giving Mr. Trump a face-saving way to sign spending bills that do not include funding for his wall. But it would be an extraordinarily aggressive move — at a minimum, a violation of constitutional norms — that would most likely thrust the wall’s fate into the courts. Here is a primer on whether Mr. Trump can use emergency powers to proceed with the project without explicit congressional permission.

    What are emergency powers?

    The president has the authority to declare a national emergency, which activates enhancements to his executive powers by essentially creating exceptions to rules that normally constrain him. The idea is to enable the government to respond quickly to a crisis.

    Although presidents have sometimes claimed that the Constitution gives them inherent powers to act beyond ordinary legal limits in an exigency, those claims tend to fare poorly when challenged in court.

    But presidents are on firmer legal ground when they invoke statutes in which Congress delegated authorities to the executive branch that can be generated in emergencies. In a recent study, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law identified 123 provisions of law granting presidents a range of such powers.

    The National Emergencies Act, enacted during the post-Watergate reform era, regulates how presidents may invoke such powers. It requires them to formally declare a national emergency and tell Congress which statutes are being activated.

    Can Mr. Trump use them to build a wall?

    Maybe. The Trump administration could point to two laws and say they allow officials to proceed with building a border wall without first obtaining explicit authorization and appropriations from Congress, according to Elizabeth Goitein, who oversaw the Brennan Center’s study and is a co-director of its Liberty and National Security Program.

    Another law permits the secretary of defense, in an emergency, to begin military construction projects “not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support such use of the armed forces,” using funds that Congress had appropriated for military construction purposes that have not yet been earmarked for specific projects.

    In light of those statutes and similar ones that give presidents flexibility to redirect funds in a crisis, the Trump administration could point to serious arguments to back up Mr. Trump if he invokes emergency powers to build a wall, said William C. Banks, a Syracuse University law professor who helped write a 1994 book about tensions between the executive and legislative branches over security and spending, “National Security Law and the Power of the Purse.”

    “The fundamental principle is that no president or official may spend funds that were not appropriated for that purpose,” he said. “But I think that it’s possible that the president could declare a national emergency and then rely on authority Congress has historically granted for exigencies to free up some funds to support constructing a barrier along the border.”

    Is Mr. Trump’s legal authority clear?

    No. If he invokes emergency powers to build a border wall, Mr. Trump is almost certain to invite a court battle. While Ms. Goitein agreed that “there is a nonfrivolous legal case to be made” that emergency-powers laws might empower Mr. Trump to spend military funds on a wall, she also pointed to counterarguments any lawsuit would have to contend with.

    For example, she noted, under one of the laws Mr. Trump might try to invoke, the military may redirect funds to build only projects that Congress has separately authorized. Lawmakers have not approved a military wall spanning the border.

    Still, the administration might argue that Congress has effectively preapproved a wall-like barrier under other laws, including one that authorizes the military to construct border “fences” blocking drug-smuggling corridors, and another, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, that empowers the Department of Homeland Security to build “physical infrastructure enhancements” along the border.

    The government could skip the requirement to identify pre-existing authorization for a wall if it invoked a different emergency-powers law for the funds, but that route would raise other problems, Ms. Goitein said. Among them, the government would need to show that a wall meets the legal definition of military construction even though it is not clearly tied to a military facility or installation and that the southern border situation represents the kind of emergency that requires the use of the armed forces.

    Does it matter if there is no true emergency?

    Probably not.

    If Mr. Trump declares that the situation along the southern border suddenly constitutes an emergency that justifies building a wall without explicit congressional sanction, he will run up against a reality: that the facts on the ground have not drastically shifted. The number of people crossing the border unlawfully is far down from its peak of nearly two decades ago. The recent caravans from Central America primarily consist of migrants who are not trying to sneak across the border but instead are presenting themselves to border officials and requesting asylum.

    And while Mr. Trump and his aides keep claiming that terrorists are sneaking in across the border, including assertions that they are doing so by the thousands, as a matter of empirical reality, there has been no such instance in the modern era.

    Still, as a matter of legal procedure, facts may be irrelevant. Before a court could decide that Mr. Trump had cynically declared an emergency under false pretenses, the court would first have to decide that the law permits judges to substitute their own thinking for the president’s in such a matter. The Justice Department would surely argue that courts should instead defer to the president’s determination.

    “If any court would actually let itself review whether this is a national emergency, he would be in big trouble,” Ms. Goitein said. “I think it would be an abuse of power to declare an emergency where none exists. The problem is that Congress has enabled that abuse of power by putting virtually no limits on the president’s ability to declare an emergency.”

    Why did Congress give presidents such broad power?

    In part by accident. When passing many emergency-powers laws, Congress attached a procedure that would let lawmakers override any particular invocation of that authority. The National Emergencies Act, for example, permitted Congress to rescind an emergency if both the House and the Senate voted for a resolution rejecting the president’s determination that one existed.

    But in 1983, the Supreme Court struck down such legislative vetoes. The justices ruled that for a congressional act to have legal effect, it must be presented to the president for signature or veto. Because it takes two-thirds of both chambers to override a veto, the ruling significantly eroded the check and balance against abuse that lawmakers had intended to be part of their delegation of standby emergency powers to presidents.
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