President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on the border on Friday, a move calculated to allow him to spend $8 billion building his wall after signing a bill to avoid a second government shutdown after a bitter standoff with Congress.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6709325/Trump-announces-national-emergency-border.htmlHe signed the declaration behind closed doors prior to a Rose Garden announcement, which he delayed while he met with women whose children were either killed by illegal immigrants or died because of drug cartels.
'We're going to be signing today, and registering, national emergency. And, it's a great thing to do, because we have an in{flux} of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it's not acceptable,' the president said.
Congress appropriated $1.375 billion that Trump can use for 'bollard' fencing in a spending bill that has not reached the president's desk, yet, but is expected to make its way to him before funding for a host of federal agencies runs out at midnight.
Trump is cobbling together the rest of the money through a patchwork operation that has him taking $600 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund and $2.5 billion from an account within the Department of Defense that is used for counter-drug activities, in order to build his wall.
Democratic lawmakers are already plotting to void his national emergency through legislation that would call it off. Opponents of the policy are also hustling to put together legal challenges.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer immediately characterized it as an 'unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist' that makes America less safe.
'This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process,' they said in a joint statement.
An hour after the president's Rose Garden event, the state of California said it would sue. The state of Washington signaled that it could do the same.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) also said it was filing suit against the Department of Justice.
'Americans deserve to know the true basis for President Trump’s unprecedented decision to enact emergency powers to pay for a border wall,' the organization's executive director, Noah Bookbinder, said in a statement. 'We’re suing because the government has so far failed produce the requested documents or provide an explanation for their delay.
Free-speech organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, filed suit, as well.
Trump acknowledged in his announcement that the national emergency he signed today would end up in court before the Ninth Circuit and eventually make its way to the Supreme Court.
'So the order is signed. And I'll sign the final papers as soon as I get into the Oval Office,' the president said. 'And we will have a national emergency. And we will then be sued, and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit even though it shouldn't be there.'
The San Francisco-headquartered Court of Appeals has tripped up Trump's other major executive orders, including his first travel ban.
Continuing to play out the court process aloud, the president said: 'We will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we will get another bad ruling, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we will get a fair shake, and we'll win in the Supreme Court.'
Trump said he was confident that he would win at the high court, where two conservative justices he out on the bench are the deciders, just like he did before.
'They sued us in the Ninth Circuit and we lost, and then we lost in the appellate division, and then we went to the Supreme Court and we won,' he stated.
The president may have harmed his legal case with some of his own public statements, however.
He said during the press conference that followed his announcement, 'I didn't need to do this. But I'd rather get it done faster.'
Administration lawyers will face the burden in court with arguing that there is an authentic crisis on the border that required the emergency designation
Trump said national emergencies have been used 'many' times by past presidents as he harangued Obama for the economic slowdown that hung like a dark cloud over much of his tenure.
He said he is considering a second emergency that would target to the cartels directly that is rooted in an emergency declaration his predecessor signed.
'It's a very good emergency that he signed. And we're going to use parts of it on our dealings on cartels. But that would be a second national emergency,' he said.
He claimed that the country was 'heading south, and it was going fast' under the previous administration. Trump meanwhile said that he's done a 'fantastic job' and that he is making America great again despite facing significant hurdles.
Aside from the border, a problem for which Democrats have been loathe to provide him any money, he said, 'We have so much money, we don't know what to do with it.
'I don't know what to do with all the money they are giving us. It's crazy,' he bragged.
Then, in remarks pointed at former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the president said that he didn't have the best people by his side the first year and a half that he was on the job.
'I was a little new to the job and profession. We had a little disappointment for the first year and a half, people that should have stepped up did not step up,' he said. 'It would have been easy. Not that easy, but it would have been a lot easier. Some people didn't step up. We are stepping up now.'
He made it clear that he was thinking of someone specific: 'I'm very disappointed in certain people, a particular one, for not having pushed this faster,' he said.
He declined to say later if his criticism was meant for Ryan, who retired last month from Congress.
'Let's not talk about it. What difference does it make? They should have pushed it faster. They should have pushed it harder, and they didn't. They didn't. If they would have, it would have been a little bit better,' Trump said.
The president said he would like to take it a step further and pass a total overhaul of the immigration system. 'Maybe that is something we can all work on where we all get together and do major immigration reform,' President Trump said.
It was hardly likely that Trump's executive action was paving the path for new congressional partnerships.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and senior senator who sits on the Judiciary committee, said the emergency is a 'disturbing abuse of power' that is the very definition of executive overreach.
'I will do everything in my power to ensure this flagrant power grab is not successful and our democracy remains strong for generations to come,' she said.
Democrats broadly panned the president's claims in his speech as fiction and his executive order as a power grab.
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading the charge in the House to stop him. She says she'll introduce a resolution to terminate it.
She charged in a tweet: ' “I didn’t need to do this” is admitting this isn’t an emergency at all. “I didn’t need to do this” means he’s faking a crisis.'
House Judiciary Committee Democrats said late Friday afternoon that they'll open an investigation into Trump's announcement.
Trump continued to claim on Friday that a wall would be 99.9 percent effective at keeping criminals out.
'Take a look at Israel. They're building another wall. Their wall is 99.9 per cent effective, they told me, 99.9 per cent. That is what it would be with us, too,' he said. 'The only weakness is they go to a wall and then they go around the wall ... It's very simple.'
On Friday the president also returned to a claim that human traffickers are tying up women and taping their mouths so they can sneak them over the border in the back of trucks unnoticed.
'You can't take human traffic, women and girls, you can't take them through ports of entry. You can't have them tied up in the back seat of a car or a truck or a van. They open the door, they look. They can't see three women with tape on their mouth or three women whose hands are tied. They go through areas where you have no wall. Everybody knows that,' he claimed. 'Nancy knows it. Chuck knows it. They all know it.'
The president's contention has actually been disputed, and some theorists believe he or someone advising him took the talking point from a fictional film.
'It's all a big lie. It's a big con game,' Trump insisted on Friday. 'You don't have to be very smart to know: You put up a barrier, the people come in and that's it. They can't do anything unless they walk left or right and they find an area where there's no barrier and they come into the United States. Welcome!'
For weeks, the president has been suggesting he would declare an emergency on the border and made it official on Friday morning in a Rose Garden announcement.
Trump pulling power from the National Emergencies Act, which U.S. presidents have used 58 time since its 1976 creation. The United States
The White House confirmed Thursday that the president will sign a bipartisan spending deal to avoid another government shutdown but will declare the national emergency in an effort to procure funds to build a border wall.
The move announced Thursday drew both statements of relief from lawmakers and a threat from Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the emergency declaration.
Pelosi called it an 'end-run around the will of the people,' speaking to reporters minutes after news of Trump's position broke, while warning it could come back to bite Republicans.
'We will review our options, we'll be prepared to respond appropriately to it,' Pelosi said, asked about Trump's planned emergency declaration.
The House speaker chaffed at the 'precedent' that the Republican president is establishing. Republican lawmakers have also said that a national emergency is not their first preference.
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told press during a call that preceded the president's remarks that today's action creates 'zero precedent' and that Democrats would have declared national emergencies for their priorities already if they believed they had the authority to do so.
'There's been some concern in the media about whether this creates a dangerous precedent. It actually creates zero precedent. This is authority given to the president in law already,' Mulvany said. 'It's not as if he just didn't get when he wanted so he's waving a magic wand and taking a bunch of money.'
Invoking the House speaker, he said, 'I saw Nancy Pelosi yesterday aid this sets the precedent for the Democrats to declare a gun emergency the next time they're in the Oval Office. That's completely false.
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31 May 2010 at 20:54
