Thread by @usacsmret

The Constitution Isn’t In Crisis—But the Border Still Is bit.ly/2u9nyIp

The Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday followed the lead of the Democratic House and voted to disapprove President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.

The success of the disapproval vote was expected in the House, where Democrats keep waving their arms and saying “It’s fine!” while women and children are violently sexually assaulted, the highest number of arrests...

Where sanctuary cities are protecting murderers, and drug seizures are up at a time when drugs are killing more people than guns, car crashes, or HIV/AIDS ever did in a single year.

Of course, gone unmentioned by Schumer and the rest of the Democrats in their flowery speeches about King George and tyranny was their loud applause for President Obama when he upset the separation of powers by creating law out of thin air with the DACA program

And, even more insidiously, grossly violating that separation of powers by making an unconstitutional appropriation from the Treasury to bail out insurance companies failing under Obamacare. (House Republicans took Obama to court over it and won.)

What Schumer and every other Democrat refuses to acknowledge is that President Trump is seeking to do something substantively different from these violations. The money he is using has already been appropriated by Congress.

And the statutory authority—the Secure Fence Act of 2006—is already on the books, giving the executive branch broad discretion to build on the border. In other words, he is executing—as is his duty and within his powers to determine the means—a law that Congress passed.

f you were to believe Schumer that the exercise of the National Emergencies Act (NEA) by President Trump is unprecedented and turns the “balance of powers” on its head, then we must be in real trouble. Because the NEA has been used close to 60 times since its passage in 1976

Moreover, no one in Congress has raised a single objection to the 31 national emergencies that are renewed annually. Neither did we hear a peep about the national emergency that President Trump extended for sanctions on Venezuela on March 5, or the one he extended on Iran

Neither Schumer, all the Senate Democrats, nor the 12 Republican senators who voted with them, have raised an objection to the 31 annually renewed national emergencies that don’t seem to be, well, very pressing.

America is still under a national emergency declared by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 during the Iran Hostage crisis. Congress has had 40 years to debate it, but hasn’t addressed it once.

Other “genuine emergencies” that apparently require ongoing declarations include “the anchorage and movement of vessels around Cuba” and one related to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who is dead.

There are also still apparently emergencies necessitating U.S. involvement of some kind in Belarus, the Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Ukraine, South Sudan, and Burundi.
But, ”How dare Trump repurpose defense spending?!” screams Schumer, Senator Marco Rubio, and National Public Radio

Where was that same indignation when presidents used national emergencies to move defense spending around 18 times between 2001 and 2014? And for real crisis situations, too, like waterfront development in Bahrain, airplane parking lots in Iraq, and a courthouse in Guantanamo Bay

Congress has wrapped itself around an axle of its own making. And, rather than do anything about it like passing Lee’s bill to amend the National Emergencies Act, they’d rather treat this as a faux constitutional crisis for which they bear no responsibility.

Meanwhile, after all the angst, the finger pointing, and foot stomping, and the floor speeches by Democrats who apparently have just now discovered the separation of powers, the border—the cause of all this sturm und drang—remains at a crisis point, ignored and unaddressed.