In a freewheeling speech delivered entirely off-teleprompter, President Trump announced the inevitable end to this border wall shutdown showdown: the declaration of a national emergency.
But Trump just as well admitted, this is not a national emergency.
“I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do this much faster,” Trump said during his Rose Garden rant.
Somewhere in a White House office, the president’s counsel is breathing into a bag and cracking open a bottle of bourbon.
In saying the quiet part out loud, Trump has single-handedly offered the dozens of legal teams preparing their lawsuits against the president the greatest gift he could give them. Even though Trump may have the objective legal right to declare a national emergency, admitting that he’s unnecessarily doing so just to expedite the process of building the wall (or slats, or fences, or whatever semantics you so desire) will without a doubt be used against him.
Trump’s best defense for mobilizing wall construction under the grounds of a national emergency was the establishment of intent: pointing to actual Department of Homeland Security statistics and human costs of unfettered illegal immigration to invoke emergency powers under the constitutional rationale that he’s suppressing an insurrection. Congress has failed to clearly define the scope and circumstances required to declare a national emergency, so Trump had legal leeway to make the case that the situation at parts of the southern border presents an immediate danger.
His cavalier phrasing and admission that his invocation is a matter of want (“I didn’t need to do this”) just destroyed that defense.
Even the staunchest defenders of enhancing our border security have admitted that punting the wall to the courts instead of making a constitutional deal with Congress is a dereliction of duty. Ann Coulter, perhaps the foremost immigration hawk in the country, responded to the report that Trump is invoking emergency powers by saying “the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years.”
No, the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years. https://t.co/6DQSkqxV8h
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) February 15, 2019
With the gift he just handed every plaintiff about to come after him, it very may well be.
Good luck to Trump’s lawyers. They’re going to need it.
