I have posted the statement of former security officials that has been submitted to Congress. In that statement, the former officials lay out concisely the case for concluding that “there is no factual basis for the declaration of a national emergency for the purpose of circumventing the appropriations process and reprogramming billions of dollars in funding to construct a wall at the southern border, as directed by” President Trump.
4 thoughts on “Statement of Former Security Officials”
Comments are closed.
Well, I certainly don’t agree with what Trump is doing, but I can’t see the courts getting in his way. He is commander in chief and if he and the Republican Senate believe our continued failure to keep people from crossing the border illegally has resulted in an emergency, who are the courts to disagree? The mistake was to give presidents the power to virtually irreversibly declare such emergencies. In theory, the Supreme Court could decide that that whole exercise violated the original understanding of the Constitution, but all of Court history is against such a hope.
I am not now speaking as a lawyer (which I am). But isn’t there something wrong with a legal system that is not connected to reality? The facts conclusively establish that no emergency exists, and the racist toddler president said that he didn’t have to declare an emergency, so we know that he doesn’t believe that one exists. And we can be certain that the Republican senators don’t believe it either, even if they haven’t publicly acknowledged it, except that their leader, McConnell, effectively did so before he decided to support the racist toddler president. Yet the courts may feel obliged to play along.
The best thing the courts could do would be to find the NEA itself unconstitutional. It is constitutionally problematical on so many levels.
The Supreme Court of Canada had to consider the existence of a national emergency in a 1976, the Anti-Inflation Reference. The alleged emergency was rampant inflation, and the emergency measure was federal wage and price controls that applied in areas normally not of federal jurisdiction.
There was federal legislation that did not use the term ’emergecncy’, and the Court had to decide if its absence mattered, given the submissions on the point. The Court did look at some extrinsic evidence as to whether there was an emergency, including an official statement of the Department of Finance.
There might be some thoughts in the decision of use to people deciding how to challenge Trump’s alleged emergency. The Court in Canada split 4-3-2, with 7 judges voting to uphold the legislation, and the other two saying that it was not up to the Court to find an emergency when the legislation had not mentioned one.
The headnote will probably give you enough of an idea of the kinds of ideas that came up. https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/2696/index.do