No, You Cannot Declare Emergency to Build Wall

"The American constitution does not contemplate such presidential unilateralism."

By Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams

After President Donald Trump on Friday claimed he could declare a national emergency in order to assert total control over the border and use existing taxpayer money to build a wall he has repeatedly told the American public that Mexico would pay for, legal experts are pointing out that Trump has no authority under the Constitution to do any such thing.

"I can do it if I want," Trump declared Friday. "We can call a national emergency because of the security of our country. We can do it. I haven't done it. I may do it."

Calling Trump's demand for the wall "constitutionally illegitimate" in an op-ed for the Guardian in the wake of the president's "bizarre" press conference outside the White House, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig argued that no reading of the nation's governing document "would ever uphold the view that a president can stop the functioning of government, to insist upon a program unsupported by the public or unrequired by the constitution."

Lessig writes:

Of all the constitutional norms that this president has upset, this, ultimately, may be the most significant. And it is this innovation that the Republicans especially should check.

For do they now concur in the precedent that a president has the constitutional authority to insist upon whatever policy he likes, regardless of its support in the public?

If a Democrat were elected on the promise to establish single-payer healthcare, does she then have the moral authority to shut down the government until Congress nationalizes the insurance industry? Or directly regulates pharmaceuticals? If she were elected on the promise to address climate change, can she stop the ordinary functioning of government until Congress passes a carbon tax?

Of course not, Lessig concludes: "The American constitution does not contemplate such presidential unilateralism."

If there was money that Trump could use to build a wall, many experts agree it will likely come from undesignated Pentagon funds.

But speaking with NBC News, Matt Dallek, professor at Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management and an expert in presidential power, said that Trump can "declare some kind of national emergency, but what it would allow him to do legally is a totally different question."

As the Trump's intransigence continues—and after admitting behind closed doors that he could not submit to the Democrat's demands because it would make him "look foolish" if he did—NBC News reports on how the concrete impacts are being increasingly felt by those federal workers locked out of working or working without pay.

Discussing the issue on MSNBC on Saturday afternoon, legal scholar and former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman said that her reading of the relevant statute is that while Trump has some authority to declare a national emergency, as Dallek noted, this doesn't qualify as one of those times and that the president has no authority to re-direct money already appropriated by Congress for other purposes towards his wall.

"This just another one of his hair-brained schemes," Holtzman said.

"And we know, time after time, his cruel, unnecessary, horrifying policies on the border—whether its separation of children from their parents or whether it's stopping people from coming in under the asylum laws or whether it’s his original total ban on Muslim immigration—all of those were shut down by the courts.

“So I think the reason he's doing this now, in this way, is he's very worried about whether he has authority and he's trying to threaten Congress. It's not going to work. The Democrats are not going to support a wall."

As a result, Holtzmann said, it is the 800,000 federal workers and their families who are being held hostage by Trump's cruelty.

"Are they going have enough money to put food on the table? Is their house going to be taken away? Is their mortgage going to be forclosed on? I mean, what is he doing to this country? For his image? That's an outrage."

As Lessig argued in his op-ed, Trump "does not act for the people. He does not act to defend the constitution. He acts to avoid, as he acknowledged to Senator Chuck Schumer, 'seeming foolish.'"