If You Build It, They Will... Sue?

by Tony Perkins: It's been a long and winding road, but Congress flew out of town today after putting one of its most contentious battles to bed: the immigration funding bill. Of course, as liberal leaders point out, the deal won't be out of the headlines for long, especially if it means President Trump is going to check off another promise and build the wall without them.

"We're going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border..." the president told reporters on an unusually warm day in Washington, "one way or the other, we have to do it." None of this comes as a surprise to people on the Hill, who never expected the White House to give up on one of its signature priorities. If Congress will only give him the money for 50 miles of border barriers, then he'll look somewhere else for the rest. "President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action -- including a national emergency -- to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border," the White House's statement said. "The President is once again delivering on his promise to build the wall, protect the border, and secure our great country."

Democrats, who've been preparing for this day for weeks, were out of the gate immediately with doomsday prophecies and legal threats. "A Democratic president can declare emergencies as well," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned. "So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by Republicans." Prepare, she went on, for a Democratic president to call gun control a national emergency -- or her lieutenants insisted "climate change" or "income inequality."

Then, with a straight face few could have conjured, Pelosi went on, "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." Sound familiar? It ought to. That's Democratic Policymaking 101 -- and Pelosi teaches the class! If anyone's gone outside the bounds of the legislative process, it's the party in charge of the House. Remember same-sex marriage? The victory that Pelosi admitted "they could never get legislatively?" Or how about the entire two terms of Barack Obama, whose presidency could be summed up in one word -- lawlessness. He made more end-runs around Congress than an NFL fullback.

Even more incredibly, Ken Klukowski points out in Breitbart, Pelosi is trying to characterize this as some sort of malevolent power grab."That is laughable to the point of being absurd. President Trump is not claiming any inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution. Instead, he is acting exclusively within the authority that Congress has explicitly granted to any president under the National Emergencies Act, which triggers 136 separate statutory powers that Congress has embedded in various laws. Presidents have declared 59 emergencies since 1979, most recently this month when President Trump declared an emergency regarding the turmoil in Venezuela. This is only one more emergency, similar to the previous 59. Congress has authorized this. The Constitution will not burst into flames. The sky will not fall. Try the decaf."As Ken points out, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 already authorizes building the wall. "So the issue," he goes on isn't one of power but "funding." "He does not require any additional authority from Congress; he requires only money." Even so, the president shrugged, the reality is, the Democrats will sue no matter what. "We will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued," he said almost nonchalantly. "Then we'll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we'll get a fair shake, and we'll win at the Supreme Court -- just like the [travel] ban."

Anything the president does, Ken argues, will end up in court. "Law, no law, emergency, no emergency... makes no difference. The litigation equation will not change. Some are also cautioning that a national emergency would create a dangerous precedent. That too is a canard. The only powers that an emergency declaration would trigger are the emergency powers that Congress has built into various federal laws. It would not lead to gun confiscations, because there is no law giving any president power to seize guns during an emergency. (Such a law would be unconstitutional in any event, because it would violate the Second Amendment.)."

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made quite clear earlier today, it's time for the Democrats to get serious about real solutions. If they don't come prepared to secure our border in the next round of appropriations, voters will know exactly who to blame.
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Tony Perkins is President of the Family Research Council . This article was on Tony Perkin's Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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