Congressional Republicans who aren’t fighting President Trump’s border wall emergency declaration are probably secretly counting on their Democratic colleagues to do the right thing after Trump leaves office.
The right thing being repeal or complete a serious revision of the presidential emergency powers law Trump has envoked to build his wall without congressional approval.
The GOP members of Congress seem willing to relinquish their constitutional power of the purse to let the president fulfill the promise he made to his base — even though most lawmakers don’t believe there is an emergency.
But surely they don’t want some future Democratic president to make an end run around Congress on issues like gun control or global warming or big pharma drug price gouging.
So, they will cynically allow abuse of the constitutional powers given the president by the Founding Fathers to avoid a hissy fit and so that Trump can punch their legislative meal tickets. Of course, they and we had it coming. After all, we allowed Congress in 1976 to relinquish its constitutional authority by enacting such an apparently vague emergency declaration law in the first place.
Though presidents have declared 58 emergencies under the law, this is the first aimed at acquiring money for an item Congress has explicitly refused to finance.
The Democratic controlled House has passed a resolution against the emergency order, and the Senate may pass it as well with the help of a few independent-minded Republicans, but no one expects enough votes to override a veto. So, the argument about presidential overreach will likely work its way through the courts for an eventual ruling by the Supreme Court.
We hope the court strikes down this particular application of the law, because it definitely feels like executive overreach — something Republicans used to say they cared about, at least when it involved a young, black Democratic president. But then, they used to say they cared about ballooning deficits, too. No more.
In fact, we wish the high court would strike down the entire emergency declaration act as unconstitutional. But that may not happen. We hope Republican lawmakers think hard about this precedent when the issue comes up in the Senate in a few weeks. It could come back to haunt them.
When the dust settles on this administration and the great border wall scrum, we do hope that the courts or a new Congress reclaims legislative power by drastically altering the emergency powers act. There may need to be a mechanism to allow the executive to act quickly in a true emergency, but the law needs to define emergency very clearly and to put stronger limits on that power.
We dislike executive overreach as much as Republicans used to. So, we may need to give up allowing a president we like from having her chance to yield excessive executive power for what we might consider a good cause.
Let’s make Congress shape policy, declare wars and decide how to spend money — like the founders intended — and not cede that authority to the president because it’s easier for lawmakers to defer than to make tough decisions, because it’s easier to run against the president of another party than to stand on your own record of difficult votes.