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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-Trump-s-national-emerg-by-Stephen-Fox-Amercian-Flag-In-An-Emergency_Army-Emergency-Relief_Checks-And-Balances_Emergency-Contraception-190215-590.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
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February 15, 2019
Trump's Emergency/Leon Panetta plus David Frum at The Atlantic: A State of Unreality
By Stephen Fox
After signing a congressional funding bill, Trump plans to declare a national emergency to obtain money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But would such an executive action be lawful? Judy Woodruff speaks with former Defense Secretary Panetta about who decides what constitutes a national emergency and if the president is attempting to circumvent Congress. Is this alarming to you, or just another "Tempest in a Teapot"?
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After signing a congressional funding bill, President Trump plans to declare a national emergency to obtain additional money for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But would such an executive action be lawful?
Judy Woodruff speaks with former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about who decides what constitutes a national emergency and whether the president is attempting to circumvent Congress.
Panetta: This year, looking at all the statistics, the numbers of people coming across the border has gone down. The enforcement has gone up. Generally, it's a hard case to make that it constitutes the kind of a national emergency that would be able to support the president's move here.
If there's a resolution that is raised in both the House and the Senate to basically reject this declaration of emergency, then Congress would have the first say as to whether or not it really constitutes an emergency.
But, ultimately, the courts will have to decide whether, indeed, the president has this kind of power. Look, Judy, we're operating under a Constitution that provides checks and balances. And those checks and balances are aimed at trying to limit the power of the president, the power of the Congress, power of the courts.
That's why our forefathers created it. A president who now uses a national emergency to bypass the will of Congress with regards to funding for a wall is basically rejecting an important check and balance that was built into our Constitution."
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By David Frum at The Atlantic: A State of UnrealityTrump's emergency declaration is going to run into four hurdles.
President Donald Trump's declaration of emergency salved yesterday's loss of face-but has not solved any real problems for this administration or the country. In fact, Trump has opened four new problems atop the original problem with which he has flailed.
The original problem is that a border wall was Trump's signature promise, backed by his guarantee-"Believe me!"-that Mexico would pay for it. Trump has successfully induced his supporters to shrug off the abandonment of his promise that "Mexico will pay for the wall," which is an impressive hustle already. He might well have induced them to forget the wall, or to accept that a light upgrade of the existing 700 miles of fencing counted as "the wall." By now, his supporters are much more invested in the idea of Trump as a success than in his achieving any success in particular.
Still, Trump has to imagine that in 2020 some political opponent will drive to an unfenced part of the U.S.-Mexico border with a camera crew, walk back and forth across it, and make a mocking campaign commercial asking: Whatever happened to the wall?
Trump's bizarre, rambling announcement of a national emergency
He felt the need to be seen doing something, at least. The state of emergency is that something. But this something comes with four catches.
The first catch is legal. The declaration of a state of emergency is heading almost immediately to court. Construction could be enjoined while the litigation proceeds. Trump could lose. Yes, that would give him somebody to blame in 2020. Liberal judges stopped the wall. But a loss with an excuse remains a loss.
By declaring an emergency, the president gains legal authority to move around some military-construction funds, reportedly about $3.6 billion. But that money has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from is other projects. "That must have been really tough. To lose. To be a loser." Those were Trump's mocking words to Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, as quoted in his new book. He'll have to wear them himself if the courts stop his wall.
The legal route imposes another risk. Few voters will understand the limits on the emergency powers Trump has just invoked. The invocation will sound to many like final confirmation that Trump aspires to dictatorship. If the courts stop him, he will look like a defeated dictator-dangerous but weakened.
The second catch is legislative. Congress will now vote on a statement of disapproval of Trump's use of his emergency authority. That statement will fly through the House of Representatives. In the Senate, it will need only 51 votes. Can Trump muster a blocking majority? Maybe not. He can veto the bill, and Congress might not muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override it. But even if he does, Congress will have gone on record accusing the president of abusing his powers, and acting like a dictator.
Central American border crossing and asylum claiming have been accelerating since the end of 2017. What kind of emergency can be postponed for 14 months? In 2018, Congress offered a lot of money for more fencing. Trump refused it. Even in 2019, it offered some. The state of emergency allows the president to reach for a little more than offered in 2019, but a lot less than was on the table in 2018. This does not look like emergency behavior. A congressional vote of disapproval will harden the already widespread impression that Trump himself does not believe his own claims, that he is playing demagogic politics with border security.
The third catch is political. The emergency powers Trump has proclaimed allow him to reshuffle money between military-construction envelopes. Every additional dollar he devotes to the border is a dollar taken from another project already approved by Congress. Every one of those projects has patrons and sponsors. And because most military contracting goes to red states, most of the reshuffled dollars will be removed from red states.
Among the projects at risk: a $32 million vehicle-maintenance shop in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I have no idea whether this project is supremely necessary or a pork-barrel boondoggle. But I bet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell strongly believes it is the former. What will Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina-up for reelection in 2020-think if Trump pulls funds from the approved but not yet contracted project for a new aircraft hangar at the Marine Corps' air station in his state? And so on down the line.
Senate Republicans have submitted to a lot since 2017. Trump might at last have discovered their breaking point.
The fourth catch is constitutional. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pointed out that Democrats stand ready and eager to make use of the emergency-powers precedent being created here if they reclaim the White House in 2020. Yet once the courts get done, Trump's precedent might actually set new limits on presidential emergency powers.
Remember, the most binding Supreme Court ruling on emergency powers delivered a rebuke to presidential power: the 1952 steel-seizure case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer. In the context of a real emergency, the Korean War, President Harry Truman tested the outer limits of his power to seize private property-and got told no. The case governs to this day.
Trump's assertion of emergency powers does not go anywhere so far as Truman's. He's messing with congressional prerogatives, not private property-but he's inviting another sharp rebuke, one that will bind future presidents, too. Those future presidents might someday want for an authentic public purpose the powers Trump will shortly squander for crass political motives. To rebuke Trump's abuses, the better presidents of tomorrow will be denied a power they might have used for good.
Trump has been hoisted high by his vision of the presidency as the world's highest-rated reality-TV drama. His instinct to escape every previous episode's failure by creating a new drama for the next episode has served him well to date. But reality TV is ultimately not reality. Government is very real, and hedged by realities. Reality is now exacting its retribution upon the Trump presidency. Ahead looms the fate that the reality-TV star must most dread: the cancellation of the whole crazy series.
(Article changed on February 15, 2019 at 20:08)
Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.
We added "2020" to the title.
I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.
I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.
Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).
For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....
My highest accomplishments thus far are
1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.
2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.
These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!
This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.
In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev