Then, money originally intended for Agriculture can be diverted because illegal immigrants often work in the fields?
I gotta say, declaring that a bunch of poor people willing to sneak in to do crappy jobs your own citizens won’t do constitutes a “national emergency” would likely be the most cowardly action taken by an American president in my lifetime. Frankly, it makes your whole country look like a bunch of panicky chickenshits.
You should be aware that “military construction” specifically refers to infrastructure on a military base. Unless Trump is talking about creating a military base hundreds or thousands of miles long, I personally do not believe he can legally use this particular authority.
I would suggest that courts would be well advised to exercise some reasonableness in determining whether a President can declare an emergency just because the Congress hasn’t agreed with his proposals. An emergency really ought to encompass a situation in which failure to act would not really be a prudent option. Like, when war breaks out, or a storm bears down on a city threatening life and property, etc. I don’t think there is anything here that passes any kind of common-sense evaluation of an emergency.
I don’t think this notion of courts evaluating the temporality of a power is too outrageous. For example, SCOTUS ruled that the President’s recess appointment power is limited to certain lengths of recesses. So I think courts could reasonably find that using a legal power to bypass Congress mainly due to impatience is not an acceptable use of such powers.
But who knows?
Yeah, but the commander has bonespurs. Cut us a little slack, as soon as the trouble starts he develops a limp. Slows him down, it does.
Your talking about the country that brought down the mighty military machine of Grenada!
Did I hear that Trump will now settle for “a number in the Twos”?
Make it $3.1 billion for border security, some of which must be spent rationally instead of on The Wall; throw in amnesty for all Dreamers; and it’s a deal!
Problem solved. HTH.
I couldn’t agree more. I feel like the generation that won WWII should rise from their graves and slap the shit out of us like George S. Patton. We’ve become a nation of cowards.
Unless we are actually going to go to war with Mexico, then calling for a national emergency to fortify the border in support of troops who may not engage militarily with anyone on either side of the border seems more than a bit off.
Congress has passed laws for funding border security. They defined how that money is to be used. they passed laws for the military, and defined how that money should be used. It is less a matter of “no money should be used for___” but rather, “This is what this money is to be used for.” If you then go and use it for something else, then congress did not approve that, and it was not an oversight, congressional leaders have explicitly said that they didn’t allocate money for a border wall.
You cannot in good faith compare that to DACA, which was the executive exercising his privilege in prioritizing crimes to investigate and prosecute with limited resources. Though, had congress passed a bill that said that “This money is to be used to find and deport people who came here as children, have lived here their whole lives, and have not committed any crimes.” Then Obama would have had to at least use that budget for that purpose. He couldn’t decide that instead, he is going to declare a national emergency and use that money to build an amusement park for the DREAMERs.
Sure, he can. They’re both things aren’t they? Things with words and stuff.
LOL, @ y’all declaring a fake national emergency so you can send in the military to take land from private citizens of the Great State of Texas. Y’all must really hate John Cornyn.
As Ravenman said, approval of actions like this depends upon who is doing it.
Kinda depends on how certain legal phrases are defined. “Fair market value”, for instance. There is, by long standing, a segment of Texas Republicans who are just to the left of Czar Nicholas II. Soothing words need to be spoken, warm comfortable checks cut. And even then, the real hard core will go apeshit.
I thought this spot on. Pay $5B for the wall, as a testament to stupidity and xenophobia! I especially like the inclusion of signs specifying that Trump and his supporters are solely responsible for this wasteful, ineffective effort. 
Setting politics aside, $5 billion is tiny in the grand scheme of federal-budget things. Both parties have causes and projects that they’d happily fork a hundred times more money on.
And yet, John McCain made a name for himself by picking out Federal projects of far, far less cost to ridicule and get in the public’s eye.
He copied that from Proxmire. Dunno who he got it from.
I just don’t see how this wall could be completed during Trump’s term of office, even if he were to win reelection. There are still unresolved eminent domain cases dating back to Bush 43’s fence, and as noted in the article I linked to earlier, in some cases, it’ll take time to determine who actually owns the land, since there are deeds in Texasdating back to Spanish ownership. That in turn would cost more money than allotted, which a future Congress may or may not approve.
Given all that, it seems to me we’d be spending $5 billion for an imaginary wall.
Awesome!
Perhaps it could take the place of a presidential library; the Donald J Trump Memorial Boondoggle. Ideally the small section that does get built should be where the lone and level sands stretch far away. Visitors could gaze upon it and then buy a thumb drive of the president’s collected “works” at the inevitable gift shop.
…which is as close a working definition of “despair” as any I’ve heard recently.
This could become a popular tourist attraction. Add in some rides for the kiddies (the Wall Street Rollercoaster?) and some adventure activities for the grown-ups (a climbing wall would seem a must) and Trumpland could become part of the quintessential American road trip, up there with the world’s biggest ball of twine! It’ll be huge!