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Tag: 2019 government shutdown
More Than A Third Of Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Funding Is Already Spent

More Than A Third Of Trump’s ‘Emergency’ Funding Is Already Spent

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

President Donald Trump now plans to build his border wall under the guise of a “national emergency.” The declaration, announced last Friday, will theoretically empower the president to divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects, $2.5 billion from federal counternarcotics programs, and $600 billion from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund to start constructing a barrier at the southern border, on top of the $1.35 billion that was allocated for border construction in the compromise bill passed by Congress to avert another shutdown.

There’s a problem, though: Trump probably can’t spend all that money. That’s because, according to Congressional Quarterly writer John Donnelly, more than a third of that money has already been spent.

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John M. Donnelly

✔@johnmdonnelly

BREAKING: More than a third of the federal 💰@realDonaldTrump wants to redirect to build a is not available. It’s been spent. Congress—including Dems—would have to approve making new 💰 available. That’s not happening. Time for a Plan B.

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That means that, right from the start, Trump is working with billions fewer than he had planned for.

And that assumes he will be allowed to spend it at all. On Thursday, House Democrats released a resolution to block Trump’s declaration under the National Emergencies Act, and Senate Democrats have their own version in the works. If either of these passes, the other chamber is required to take it up, and it is not clear whether Republicans have yet whipped the votes necessary to affirm the president. Meanwhile, 16 states have banded together in a lawsuit to block the emergency declaration in federal court.

The upshot of this is that the only money Trump is absolutely guaranteed to have for construction at the border is the $1.35 billion he received from Congress, which theoretically would pay for just 55 miles of fencing. And even there, Democrats put heavy restrictions on how Trump can use that money: only existing designs, no construction in five sensitive areas including the National Butterfly Center, and the Department of Homeland Security must consult with local governments before any new barriers can be built.

All things considered, Trump’s hopes of using a national emergency as a shortcut are looking shakier by the day.

Danziger: A Fistful Of Billions

Danziger: A Fistful Of Billions

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

With One Phrase, Trump Shatters His ‘National Emergency’ Claim

With One Phrase, Trump Shatters His ‘National Emergency’ Claim

In a rambling and frequently senseless rant to reporters on Friday, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency as part of a ham-fisted effort to secure more funding for a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

The plan is legally and constitutionally questionable on its face. But in an answer to a question by NBC News’ Peter Alexander, Trump may have doomed any legal defense of the move, which is almost certain to face court challenges.

Alexander noted that Trump had been critical in the past of President Barack Obama’s supposed executive overreach, and he wondered how the White House squares those claims with its current actions.

Trump rambled a reply, claiming he got more money than he knew what to do with for border security but not enough for the wall. But then he noted that he could get more for the wall over time, if he wanted.

“I could do the wall over a longer period of time,” he said. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

Legal experts immediately pointed out that this claim undercuts the basis for Trump’s emergency declaration.

“If Trump ‘didn’t need to do this,’ how could it possibly be a national emergency?” asked former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.

Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, argued that other presidents have used relatively flimsy excuses to declare national emergencies, so Trump has some precedent to rely on, even if his reasoning is erroneous.

“But Trump makes what he is doing seem, and in reality be, much worse because he suggests openly that there is no real emergency (‘I didn’t need to do this’), instead of (as past presidents did) hiding the ball or using more effective rhetoric in a less divisive context,” said Goldsmith.

George Conway, a prominent conservative lawyer who happens to be married to top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, also pointed to the president’s assertion as being particularly damning.

“This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon,” he said on Twitter.

There’s never been a legal challenge to a national emergency before, so it’s far from clear how any such cases will be resolved. And the conservative Supreme Court has shown a desire to defer to the president on national security matters, even when his own statements undermine the case the administration’s lawyers make. But if the judicial branch is open at allto having a president’s emergency declaration challenged, the fact that the president himself said the move was unnecessary should be a particularly powerful argument against him.

Watch the clip below:

 

‘Garbage!’ Trump’s Fox News Gang Divided On Spending Deal

‘Garbage!’ Trump’s Fox News Gang Divided On Spending Deal

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Congressional negotiators announced on Monday night that they had reached a tentative deal on spending legislation that would avoid another partial government shutdown when current funding expires on Friday. The group hopes its compromise, which includes $1.375 billion for physical barriers and a 17 percent reduction in beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will satisfy President Donald Trump’s immigration policy demands while still maintaining enough Democratic support to pass the House of Representatives.

The negotiators represent both parties and both houses of Congress and say they received approval from congressional leaders and consulted with the White House throughout the process. But they did not run the proposal past the president’s influential Fox News cabinet, and now several of Trump’s leading propagandists are publicly weighing in and urging him to scuttle the deal. Their pleas could determine the response from Trump, who has yet to indicate whether he will support legislation that gives him much less in barrier funding than he has demanded.

Shortly after news of the deal broke, Sean Hannity briefly cut away from airing Trump’s rally in El Paso, TX, to issue a stern warning to congressional Republicans. Denouncing the proposal for providing too little funding for a border wall, he said that “any Republican that supports this garbage compromise, you will have to explain.”

The Fox host holds enormous sway over the president, who consults with him so frequently that White House aides have termed the Fox host his shadow chief of staff, leading conservative commentator Charlie Sykes to describe this response as “the Hannity veto.”

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, another favorite of the president who, like Hannity, reportedly advised Trump on his shutdown strategy, has also denounced the proposal. “Radical Dimms refuse to protect America, their ‘Deal’ is an insult to [Trump] and the American people,” he tweeted late Monday night.

Dobbs and Hannity have for weeks been urging Trump to declare a national emergency in order to obtain funding for the border wall, even as Republican congressional leaders warn him away from the tactic. The White House is reportedly still considering ways to divert appropriated but unspent funds to the border wall, whether Trump takes the deal or not and with or without an emergency declaration.

Fox host Laura Ingraham, an anti-immigration hard-liner whom the president reportedly considered for a White House job, has also criticized the “pathetic” deal.

Trump’s Fox advisers are not universally opposed to the spending proposal. The hosts of Fox & Friends opened Tuesday’s show by suggesting that the president accept it, spinning the deal as a win for Trump. Co-host Steve Doocy also said, “I bet he’s got something else up his sleeve,” adding that Trump could “legally reprogram” other funds to build the wall without declaring a national emergency.

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Trump craves validation from the people he watches on TV most days, giving these propagandists an outsized impact over whether the government shuts down again this week.