The president has shot down his last card for additional funding. This decision, a real circumvention of the Congress, should trigger a political frond and a judicial guerrilla.
Donald Trump opened a new front on Thursday, Feb. 14, attempting an ultimate counterattack about the wall he promised to build on the border with Mexico. Unable to get the funding he demanded from Congress, for lack of the necessary votes in the Senate and the House of Representatives, he shot down the last card he had in his game by announcing that he will quickly declare by decree a state “national emergency”.
He had to speak about it on Friday morning at the White House. This decision should trigger a judicial guerrilla as well as test the balance of power, as well as its hold on a divided party.
Three days earlier, on Monday, the Democrats and Republicans had reached a budget compromise to avoid a new partial shutdown of the federal government from February 15. They agreed on the $ 1.3 billion (1.1 billion euros) to finance the construction of 55 miles (88 kilometers) of new barriers, far from the $ 5.7 billion previously required by the president. The political cost to the Republicans of the last thirty-five-day shutdown, the longest in history, of which they had been found to be largely responsible, had pushed the elected officials of the Grand Old Party (GOP) to this concession.
Thursday morning, the rumor from the White House has briefly suggested, according to US media, that the president would not initial the finance law that Congress was preparing to vote. The concern is so high that at the beginning of the session in the Senate a republican cacique, Chuck Grassley, invited his colleagues “to pray for the president to have the wisdom to [sign]”. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell later raised the suspense by securing a commitment from Donald Trump, while announcing that he would resort to a declaration of national emergency to obtain additional funds and circumvent so Congress.
This choice is dangerous in more ways than one. First, it comes up against the massive disapproval of American public opinion. Two-thirds of respondents disagreed, according to the converging results of several polling institutes published in the last three weeks.
Even if they supported the president in the same proportion on this point, the republican sympathizers – generally unanimous – were none the less divided. The fact that Congress has reached an agreement that prevents Donald Trump from justifying his decision by arguing that the legislature is powerless will only increase the turmoil.
In addition to the uncertainty of the lack of any Supreme Court case law, this declaration of national emergency worries some Republicans, who warn against a precedent. These fractures may come to light if the Congress is called upon to decide on this decision as the Democrats want.
In January, former 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who became a Utah senator, said it should be limited to “the most extreme circumstances.” The Republican Senator Marco Rubio had judged for his part that “if, today, the national emergency is the security of borders, tomorrow, the national emergency could be climate change,” to emphasize the dangerousness, in his eyes, such a loophole. In a stern editorial on Thursday night, the Wall Street Journal resumed the same argument for denouncing what it considers a leap forward.
Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi rushed into the breach. “The precedent that the president sets is something that should cause the greatest discomfort and disarray of Republicans,” she said. It did not fail to add, in reference to the anniversary of the Parkland Massacre (Florida), February 14, 2018, that a Democratic President could in the future proceed in the same way about firearms to fight against the multiplication of mass killings.
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