An opinion-editorial piece about current events.
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U.S. president Donald Trump recently declared a “national emergency” under which he intends to divert money from the US Department of Defense’s budget and use it to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
No biggie, Trump said as he announced the “emergency.” Happens all the time (59 other times since 1976, to be exact). Purely routine.
But it’s not routine at all. It is, in fact, a declaration of presidential dictatorship that shreds the US Constitution’s separation of powers requirements.
Most presidential emergency declarations have been either on matters supposedly requiring immediate action which Congress could be expected to subsequently approve (for example, George W. Bush’s 2001 declaration of emergency in the wake of 9/11), or pursuant to policies already approved by Congress (for example, specific sanctions on countries already condemned by Congress to general treatment of that type).
Trump’s declaration is different -- but there is applicable precedent to consider. We’ve been down this road before, just not quite so far.
In 2013, Republicans in Congress flirted with refusal to raise the “debt ceiling” -- a limit on how much money the federal government allows itself to borrow.