The president failed on Tuesday evening to deliver an even minimally credible case to support his claim that there is "a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border." Nothing that he said in a rambling eight-minute recitation of talking points and applause lines from campaign rallies could justify his use of emergency powers to build an unnecessary and unworkable border wall.

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The president's speech was a mangled mess of lies and fearmongering that further discredited his shutdown gambit.

The only thing that Donald Trump's first speech to the nation from the Oval Office proved is that Trump is no good at making speeches to the nation from the Oval Office. The president failed on Tuesday evening to deliver an even minimally credible case to support his claim that there is "a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border." Nothing that he said in a rambling eight-minute recitation of talking points and applause lines from campaign rallies could justify his use of emergency powers to build an unnecessary and unworkable border wall.

These are the vital takeaways from Trump's speech, as the president and his aides have in recent days been suggesting that he might declare a national emergency as part of a scheme to "secure the border."

Presidents have limited authority to declare national emergencies when there are crises so severe that immediate action is necessary. But presidents cannot abuse this authority; they must operate within boundaries established by judicial precedent and the 1976 National Emergencies Act.

These actual facts must frame the debate about this president's fact-free assertion that he might invoke emergency powers to justify the expenditure of billions of dollars to build a border wall that has not been authorized by Congress. And they create the context in which Tuesday's speech must be assessed.

Every president is duty-bound to make a compelling case for the use of emergency powers. That was what made Trump's extraordinary address to the nation Tuesday evening such a big deal.

And such a disaster for his crumbling presidency.

Trump wanted to portray his border-security agenda as "just common sense." But there was nothing sensible about the squinting president's attempt to read from the "how-much-more-American-blood-must-we-shed" script that his fear-mongering speechwriters had crafted.

Claiming that he was determined to end a "cycle of human suffering," Trump offered up a stew of outright lies and false premises. He tried to suggest that he sympathized with immigrants, while at the same time portraying them as violent criminals. He repeated his absurd promise that Mexico will pay for the wall, with the footnote that this will now happen "indirectly." He asserted that immigrants take jobs from American workers, at a time when American employers say they struggle to fill positions. He tried to blame congressional Democrats for a government shutdown, after telling Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi less than a month ago that "I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down -- I'm not going to blame you for it."

Trump's address was precisely the "word salad of nonsense" that the Rev. Jesse Jackson predicted it would be. It did nothing to change the reality that, as the civil-rights leader noted, "There is no crisis at the southern border. No caravans, trying to sneak in; no terrorists coming across in mass numbers. The greatest number of undocumented immigrants in the United States are those who have overstayed their visas after coming here legally by plane." And it did nothing to justify what Jackson decried as Trump's "phony emergency."

Since the president failed to make the case that was required of him, Congress must be prepared to check and balance Trump before his infamy becomes a disaster for the nation.

"If the president follows through on the threat to declare a state of emergency simply to circumvent the legislative branch and build a wall on the Mexican border," says Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn, "then Congress must act swiftly and decisively to check the abuse utilizing the National Emergencies Act, which was enacted in 1976 as a post-Watergate reform to reassert Congress's constitutional role in checking and safeguarding against authoritarian abuses of power."

That will not be easy in the divided city of Washington. But it is necessary. The declaration of an emergency when no emergency exists, especially when it is done with the purpose of diverting money to a project that is unauthorized, must always be met with an urgent response. This response needs to make clear that abuses of power cannot be permitted without a fight.

Democrats should be prepared to force the issue. Doing so will signal that responsible elected officials, hopefully from both parties, do not accept the president's outrageous -- and dangerous -- claims regarding immigrants. Doing so will also indicate that members of Congress are prepared to do battle on behalf of the Constitution. Even if efforts to check and balance the president fail in the short term, a challenge to Trump on this vital issue allows House Democrats to claim the moral and political high ground as they assert their new majority status.

Trump, for his part, has no ground to stand on.

To read this entire article, go to The Nation

Authors Bio:

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.


Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.


Nichols is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. He was featured in Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," and in the documentaries Joan Sekler's "Unprecedented," Matt Kohn's "Call It Democracy" and Robert Pappas' "Orwell Rolls in his Grave." The keynote speaker at the 2004 Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in Athens, Nichols has been a featured presenter at conventions, conferences and public forums on media issues sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Consumers International, the Future of Music Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Newspaper Guild [CWA] and dozens of other organizations.


Nichols is the author of the upcoming book The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), as well as a critically-acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press) and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press), which has recently been published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), of which historian Howard Zinn said: "At exactly the time when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems, and songs from throughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country."


With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books, It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories) and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.


Of Nichols, author Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest."