Before a vote on a resolution to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked House Republicans if they took their oath from Mr. Trump or “the Constitution of the United States?” The measure passed and goes to the Senate.
ed note–again, not that it should need any further explaining, this is not about a ‘border wall’ between the US and Mexico, but rather about one between Israel and the Arabs which Trump means to create as a result of his ‘deal of the century’. What he aims to do is to accumulate the necessary political capital from this particular poker hand vis his base of support in order to raise the stakes in the next hand when his ‘peace deal’ push begins in a few months.
Nor is this about the oath to the Constitution which all officers of the US Government are required to take prior to beginning their term, but rather the promises and oaths to Netanyahu and Israel that all hirelings are required to make behind closed doors with no witnesses present and the manner by which said office is to be used in furthering Israel’s demands.
NYT
The House voted on Tuesday to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the Mexican border, with just 13 Republicans joining Democrats to try to block his effort to divert funding to a border wall without congressional approval.
House Republican leaders kept defections low after feverishly working to assuage concerns among rank-and-file members about protecting congressional powers and about the precedent that Mr. Trump could be setting for Democratic presidents to use for their own purposes.
“Is your oath of office to Donald Trump or is it to the Constitution of the United States?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked her Republican colleagues in a speech on the floor ahead of the vote. “You cannot let him undermine your pledge to the Constitution.”
The resolution of disapproval, which passed 245 to 182, must now be taken up by the Senate, where three Republicans have already declared their support, only one short of the number needed for Congress to ratify a stinging rebuke of Mr. Trump’s efforts.
It remains highly unlikely that opponents will muster the votes to overturn a promised veto of the resolution. But final passage of a measure to assert Congress’s constitutional authority over spending is sure to bolster numerous lawsuits that maintain that Mr. Trump’s declaration is an unconstitutional end run around Congress’s lawful power of the purse.
Many of the 13 Republicans who defected in the House were adamant in their arguments. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a veteran lawmaker who once helped manage Republican efforts to remove Bill Clinton from the White House, made it clear he supported the border wall.
But, he said, “insufficient action — however frustrating it may be — is still the prerogative of the legislative branch. It is imperative that no administration, Republican or Democratic, circumvent the will of Congress.”
In the Senate, where lawmakers are required to vote on the resolution in the coming weeks, those concerns persisted. Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader and an open supporter of the declaration, declined to offer his opinion on the legal merits.
“We’re in the process of weighing that,” Mr. McConnell said when asked at a news conference on Tuesday. “I haven’t reached a total conclusion.”
“You can’t blame the president for trying to use whatever tool he thinks he has to address it,” he added.
More than a dozen Republicans voted with Democrats to block President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the United States border with Mexico.
But ahead of the Senate vote, lawmakers have not said what their next steps would be if the resolution to stop the emergency declaration fails.
Three Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — have said that they will support the resolution, and several others have expressed extreme unease. Vice President Mike Pence and a Justice Department lawyer joined Republican senators on Tuesday for a lunch on Capitol Hill to outline what they maintained was the president’s statutory authority for the declaration and need for additional money.
Mr. Pence faced some frustration from senators about Mr. Trump’s decision to make the declaration and the legal grounds for doing so, particularly from Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, according to three people familiar with the exchange who asked for anonymity to describe a private meeting.
When Mr. Paul argued that Mr. Pence, a former representative, would have opposed Mr. Trump’s use of an emergency declaration and compared it to President Barack Obama’s use of an executive order to establish protections for young undocumented immigrants under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Mr. Pence objected, according to one person. He argued that there was a difference between the two uses of executive power, according to two people.
A spokesman for Mr. Paul said that the senator had raised concerns, along with other senators, about the declaration but that the exchange was not contentious.
Mr. McConnell acknowledged that there had been “a fulsome discussion” during the meeting, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close ally of the president, said he hoped that as a result of the discussion, “we will prevail.”
But some senators emerged from the lunch still reluctant to say how they would vote.
“Any action by the administration must comply with federal law, so I am reviewing and assessing the specific legal authorities and justifications put forth by the administration,” said Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. “I am very worried about the slippery slope that could occur.”
Some Republican lawmakers and aides said they were unconcerned because they were confident that they could prevent the two-thirds majority needed in both chambers to override a presidential veto, possibly the first delivered by Mr. Trump.
“There will be nowhere near the votes to override a veto,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip, said Tuesday morning at a news conference. “Ultimately, we’re going to stand with the president in making sure we can secure this border.”
The resolution of disapproval, under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, serves as the easiest mechanism for Congress to end Mr. Trump’s declaration. House Democrats are still weighing the possibility of joining one of the lawsuits that have been filed to challenge the merits of the declaration.
Democrats, who overwhelmingly endorsed the resolution of disapproval, framed the vote as an ultimatum on whether lawmakers would buck party loyalty in order to protect Congress’s constitutionally granted powers. Ms. Pelosi, in a floor speech on Tuesday, listed a number of instances in which House Republicans had objected to Mr. Obama’s use of executive power, vowing that “we are not going to give any president, Democratic or Republican, a blank check to shred the Constitution of the United States.”
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she would vote in favor of a resolution to block President Trump’s emergency declaration.
Representative Joaquin Castro called the vote on the one-page resolution “the most important vote, probably in a generation, on the separation of powers.”