Trump Does the Right Thing on Border Securty – Will John Roberts do the Same?

See something, say something, do something. – President Donald Trump has seen a national emergency developing along our southern border for several years now, and he’s been saying that for a long time now. On Thursday, left with no other choice by ineffective Republicans who have no spine and Democrats who refuse to negotiate, the President did exactly as he has been promising to do and declared the situation to be a national emergency.

Naturally, the fake news media/Democrat axis of disinformation portrayed the declaration as the end of American society as we know it, because of course they did. That’s what they do anytime this particular President exercises his obvious legal and constitutional authorities.

How obvious is said authority? Barack Hussein Obama – America’s Worst Mistake – declared no fewer than 13 national emergencies in his nine years in office, at least nine of which are still active. On October 24, 2009, he declared it a “national emergency” when 12 people died of the Swine Flu. I swear I don’t make this stuff up. Who could?

All of the Obama “national emergency” declarations that are still active have to do with seizing the personal assets of various minor international bad actors, people you’ve never heard of. Funny he couldn’t find it within himself to take similar actions against the Iranian Mullahs or the socialist thugs down in Venezuela, or against the radical Islamic terrorists who assaulted our embassy in Benghazi and murdered four U.S. diplomatic personnel.

How do any of Obama’s “emergencies” remotely compare to a situation in which our country is literally being invaded by thousands of mostly-military-age males across our border with Mexico each and every day? It is important to note that, when America’s Worst Mistake exercised his clear authorities to declare said “emergencies,” no one in our fake news media or in the Democrat Party uttered a peep of protest. Nor did a single Republican squish like Marco Rubio, who appears to be auditioning for John McCain’s old role as the Senator From The News Media on this issue.

Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University, told Fox News that the leftist interests who will inevitably challenge the President’s authority to declare this emergency will “fail spectacularly” in the courts on that question. He also thinks that the President has full authority under laws passed in 1977 to reallocate funds from other parts of the budget, and in 2005 to target them towards building the wall. Why? Because congress gave presidents those powers – reaffirming his already-existing constitutional authority – to do those things, and has never acted to try to repeal them.

So what you’re seeing in the fake news media this morning is – you guessed it – more fake news!

Having said all of that, there are at least seemingly legitimate political arguments to be made against President Trump’s actions. I don’t agree with them, but they are fair.

Many Republicans reeled in horror yesterday when San Fran Nan implied that a future Democrat President might use the same authority to seize guns. But this is an absurdity. There is no authority – statutory or constitutional – that would allow any president to effectively amend the Constitution or reverse decisions by the Supreme Court via an executive order. It’s typical Pelosi idiocy.

Late last week we saw Rubio and other GOP squishes fret about the potential that a future Democrat would declare “climate change” to be a national emergency and enact the lunatic “Green New Deal” via executive fiat. That’s a concern that’s at least understandable to some extent, especially were we to elect someone like Bernie Sanders or Fauxcahontas, neither of whom will ever become president.

But the declaration of a “national emergency” is not the same as a president appointing himself to be a de facto dictator. The actions he takes under a national emergency declaration still must be founded in a legal authority, either statutory or constitutional. Where the “Green New Deal” is concerned, there is no such legal authority that would allow a president to, for example, unilaterally triple the price of gasoline and your electricity and home heating bills in order to make you stop using fossil fuels, or force privately-owned companies to go bankrupt building thousands of miles of railroads to nowhere, which is exactly what that mindless plan contemplates.

Look, if that were going to happen, Barack Obama would have already tried it and failed. So quit worrying about it.

The real wild card in this is Chief Justice John Roberts. In recent months, Roberts has made several decisions in which he has sided with the leftist minority on the Court, indicating that he may be turning into another Anthony Kennedy, an unreliable jurist with no real principles.

At least one of the inevitable court challenges to President Trump’s declaration will ultimately come before the Supreme Court. That is when we will find out once and for all whether Justice Roberts still respects the Constitution and his role in interpreting it, or if he has become just another Deep State skunk.

The government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. They will get war too.

(Attributed to Winston Churchill.)

A combination of malevolent Democrats and pusillanimous Republicans have produced a predicament which I foresaw LINK

Now the president is confronted with a Hobson's choice, either abandon any hope of properly policing the border or shut down the government.

As I understand it, the president will choose to sign this bill. I think he will be making a very grave mistake. Fox news is playing it about half right, the Republicans let the president down. One commentator quite rightly suggests that the Republicans who negotiated this travesty as well as those Republicans who voted to sustain it were motivated to protect institutional turf. They were also victims of the Mitch McConnell syndrome, to avoid government shutdown at virtually any cost.

This legislation codifies the triumph of the legislative branch over the executive branch in defining how the border shall be policed. Heretofore, much of the discretion about enforcement on the border was in the hands of the executive, now many of those decisions have been codified by law and they are always on the side of open immigration. For example, the extended family provisions which say that those credibly claiming some sort of relationship to infants may not be deported.

Mayors are given veto power over the placement of the wall. National parks and federal property are declared tierra prohibida.

What is the upside for this loss of ability of the executive to police the border and to build the wall where it might really count? A trifling sum somewhat in excess of $1 billion, most or all of which may not be used to construct a new wall. Yet some say these trifling amounts are needed to commence border construction especially with onrushing caravans of illegal immigrants. Even if this money were available for that purpose, there is not enough time to build a wall to stop caravans already en route.

Well some say, the president is going to declare an emergency and scrape together up to $8 billion for his wall. This legislation has absolutely nothing to do with that. His vulnerabilities before the ninth circuit to enjoin his national emergency or his diversion of funds for being illegal is not affected. Or on the other hand perhaps it is affected, with a Ninth Circuit judge declaring that Congress has spoken that Congress has considered whether I'm an emergency exists and has made provisions for that emergency which the president himself has signed. Now the government is limited to its own law. Whether that is a meritorious legal argument or not, the point is a Ninth Circuit judge is likely to find that it is.

So at the end of the day, the president is likely to lose in the Ninth Circuit, likely to lose in the appellate level of the Ninth Circuit, and not at all assured of victory in the Supreme Court if he can get there in a timely manner, which is also not certain. Worse, it is not even certain that the president could get to the supreme court at all. In the event the case is heard, consider the proclivities of one justice, the Chief Justice, he is an institutionalist who twice upheld Obamacare, saving it. He Is entirely unreliable from a conservative point of view. We already know that there is no chance of a honest hearing from any of the four leftist justices, who are ideologically committed without regard for the Constitution. Thus, we are betting the eight billion precious border wall dollars on Chief Justice John Roberts.

Good luck with that.

So the Republicans in the House and the Senate have served up to this president an impossible predicament. We really ought to think long and hard about who these people are actually serving. Clearly it is not their conservative constituents. Please see the link above.

Why has the president decided to sign this? Not because it makes sense from immigration point of view but only because to veto it means that he will have shut down the government. This is the nice predicament that the Democrats and the Republicans have maneuvered the president into.

It is understandable that the president refrains from shutting down the government by veto but it is also to be noted that this is being done by a continuing resolution, in this case a double-barreled disaster. It is a terrible border immigration law and it is yet another continuing resolution which the president vowed to veto.

Whether Trump bears any responsibility for this, I cannot consider in this forum for fear of being banned as a never Trumper. I leave that to others. I merely offer the idea that the president should have declared the emergency first and then vetoed the continuing resolution and had the Republicans in the Senate (evidently it is okay for spending bills now to be originated in the Senate -witness the continuing resolution which the president is about to sign) or the House offer up a continuing resolution for a short time to keep the government open.

So this is a win-win for Nancy Pelosi and a lose-lose for conservatives. Nancy Pelosi won but the president was rolled by his own party.

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