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Jonah Goldberg and Charlie Cooke are not pleased
Charlie and Jonah are not pleased with Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency in order to get the border wall built. Charlie complains that it is wrong to ask Congress and then ignore their answer. It seems contradictory and out of order to him. But there is nothing wrong with seeking consensus even when consensus is not required by law.
I permit my wife to charge things to our credit account even when I disagree with its purpose – but things go more smoothly when we discuss it ahead of time. I do not withdraw the privilege already granted to her just because I disagree with a purchase that represents a small fraction of our spending. If she were to buy a leopard-print couch for the living room at a cost of a month’s pay – that’s a problem. If I agree to her getting a manicure at the nail salon and she splurges on leopard-spot fingernails — happy wife, happy life.
The border wall spending is less than 0.14% of our annual spending. It is money already allocated to be spent. Congress refused to allocate more (a shame — but that’s a consequence of the 2018 election). It did not explicitly withdraw the pre-allocated funds, however. Nor did it repeal Presidential authority to declare a national emergency.
Jonah calls Trump’s action “horrifying.” There is nothing horrifying about this. Just because he never bothered to notice this Presidential power until Trump attempted to use it for a controversial purpose does not make this existing authority horrifying. It’s the law. He has exercised it in accordance with the way statutes are written (or the courts will say otherwise). It’s a power presidents were given.
Trump is not a second-class President. He does not have less power than previous Presidents, and your particular lack of confidence in the current President does not change his power to exercise these powers.
And the big difference between this and Obama’s unconstitutional DAPA and DACA programs, Obama lacked statutory authority. In the case of DAPA, the courts said so explicitly.
There is a big difference between passing a law by Presidential order and repurposing allocated funds – funds allocated by Congressional majority – by dint of powers granted to him by Congressional majority.
President Trump is not legislating in this case and is not allocating funds.
Moreover, we have a mechanism for Congress to override Trump’s emergency declaration. If Trump is overridden by Congressional supermajorities and still attempts to repurpose the funds, then we will have a problem.
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Here we go again.
I’m for the wall as much as anyone, but this approach of finding columnists who don’t agree with ME and flogging their positions endlessly is getting old. Yes, people have different points of view, but what is it with this Never-Goldberg obsession? And Charlie Cooke is a pretty smart guy for someone who just became an American citizen a year ago.
Sheesh.
Not sure that should be our standard measure for Presidential actions.
I’m not making a legal argument. When I say the funding was denied, I am referring to the spending package that allocated 1.6 B or whatever for border security/wall. That was an explicit rebuke of the president’s desire for greater (5.6 B) funds, there’s not really any other way to view the shutdown theater. You can argue that certain statutes grant a president greater leeway but without a doubt, Congress did not allocate the disputed funds for wall construction.
I care about the Steel Seizures only for the Jackson concurrence, but I agree the facts are not applicable here.
Side Bar:
First, he people don’t elect the President: the states do. So the popular vote doesn’t matter.
Second, I don’t think the President ought to represent anyone, not even his voters. He should faitfully execute the laws and the oath of office.
Now…I gotta go for my morning constitutional.
Goldberg has zero space in my head. I never read anything he now writes or tweets. Ditto Will, Sykes, etc etc. Used to listen to their podcasts, or radio programs or buy their books or magazines. I finally get it.
Not really. Point is, the only people that matter now are judges, and they will care about the strength of arguments and the logical legal precedents that get created. Do you really think John Roberts would be persuaded by these arguments? I’m confident he won’t. The DAPA case even made more sense.
Doesn’t mean folks can’t jaw about it, eh? Should we only discuss issues where we have some actual impact on the results?
I don’t agree with the President’s decision, and I expect this thing will go all the way to SCOTUS, and we’ll have lots of theater and gnashing of teeth. How it’ll come out, I don’t know. But just because John Roberts doesn’t agree with us doesn’t mean we can’t have the convo.
I don’t know about this, and I’ll defer to smarter people and the court on it. I think, though, that “horrifying” is not quite an appropriate adjective. At worst, “procedurally defective”. Instead of passing meaningless resolutions, congress has real power to rein in the president on this. They should use it. Failing that, they should fix or withdraw the emergency declaration power they granted to the president in order to prevent such perceived overreach in the future. Again, I didn’t want President Trump to go this route, but I’m also tired of people treating this is as some unprecedented action which is evidence that Trump really has been an authoritarian in waiting all along.
I think this is exactly right. If the emergency declaration hold up, it will only be because Congress drafted the statute poorly and the Court is unwilling to get in the middle of it. I’m all for judicial restraint and even though I don’t believe overturning the president here would violate that principal, I can at least see the argument.
What I have not heard anyone say, even Trump supporters, is that the President is using these statutes as they were intended. There is simply no way that Congress intended these emergency powers to be a trump card for the President to bypass Congress on a years old contentious debate. These statutes have never been used that way before. So, even if the Court finds for the President on a technicality, this is still an expansion of executive power that should concern us all. I think that is Goldberg and Cooke’s broader point.
And at least they are consistent. Does anyone doubt that most of the folks here defending this would be apoplectic, and rightfully so, if a Democrat were doing the same thing with high speed rail, or windmills, or whatever pet progressive project? Of course they would. Would they be saying, “Well, shoot, looks like it’s clearly within the president’s power to do this.” Of course they wouldn’t.
And that isn’t anything which should cause either side worry. There are a patchwork of laws; there are gray areas. It’s not unconscionable to take a position and then battle it out legislatively, judicially, and politically. That’s the system working. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
Instead of slow and steady immigration with plenty of pauses for assimilation, somewhere along the line the barriers were taken down and we were overrun – metaphorically, though in some places the metaphor is pretty close to literal. For instance, in my neighborhoods in Chicago there weren’t so much ethnic white enclaves anymore (except the Polish community which was still drawing from communist Eastern Europe) as they had mostly mixed and mingled; there were still stark dividing lines between white and black neighborhoods, though. Then came the hispanic population mixing into both white and black neighborhoods. In the eighties something changed; by the early to mid nineties so many neighborhoods didn’t merely changeover ethnicities, they changed character. Entirely. It was so fast. It was a replacement of one population with another in the span of 10-20 years. To be sure there are other reasons for that too: easy credit fueling expansion of construction in the suburbs; the steady bleeding away of solid manufacturing and businesses from Chicago; corruption; etc. However, people are still feeling and remembering that, and it isn’t racism. I grew up with diversity of some kinds, but cohesiveness of teh important kinds. Polish, Irish, Italian, Mexican, etc. – I grew up in predominantly Catholic neighborhoods with strong focus on parish life. We ate different foods but we spoke the same language and held the same beliefs and assumptions about life. I remember it fondly. It’s different now; the only commonalities are instersectional. As intended, I suspect.
I think the implication is that Jonah’s real problem with the emergency powers act is that Trump is the president weilding the power, not that Jonah is generally inconsistent or hypocritical. The act been used some three dozen times I gather, all throughout the time Jonah has been a prominent pundit. Many of those emergencies are still in effect even though Congress has had ample opportunity to act in the intervening years. Has Jonah ever found exercising the powers under this act horrifying before?
Who here is eager to exploit ambiguity in pursuit of executive power? The point is that some formerly loved and respected conservatives now take every chance to find the side of ambiguity which is anti-Trump when the very same powers Trump is now employing have been employed many times to zero kerfuffle.
I think caravans and new controversy surrounding normal policies about housing and processing people especially minors is new. Plus, as I understand it, there are still several Bush and Obama emergencies still in effect even though congress could have acted by now; even at the time it seems that Congress had time to act on them without an emergency declaration. I think we shouldn’t ascribe our own conceptions of “emergency” to this law – to me an emergency is immediate and emergent and of big impact. Seems like none of the declared emergencies meet that standard.
There are 31 of these “National Emergencies” still in effect, dating back to 1979.
A large number of them deal with things only at best peripheral to a real national emergency, like elections in Belarus or problems in the Balkans or Somali pirates. Meanwhile we’ve had a real emergency on the border and congress has done worse than nothing. Suddenly because it’s “orange man bad” it’s suddenly a threat to the Constitution.
With respect, we are not a monarchy.
To my knowledge, none of the previous emergency declarations have been used to go around Congress in a debate that has been going in for decades. For the president to use these powers in this way is a new thing.
Besides, Goldberg and Cooke never say they object to the president having emergency powers generally. They don’t have to defend all the previous ones to be consistent. None have threatened to increase presidential powe inthe way this one does. Just as you are looking to those previous ones, so will future presidents look to this one.
That is how I read @milkchaser‘s implication, too.
I read it the same way as you did.
A “what-aboutist” argument is that the accused
Hence, the person is guilty of hypocrisy. It isn’t a claim of past inconsistency. It’s a claim of inconsistency of application between this case and the past.
Perhaps Jonah was being hypocritical. I would like to know.
But no evidence was given of it. He may in fact have been perfectly consistent: he may consider that fact that Trump is President to be irrelevant, as you and @milkchaser and I do.
So you’ll be okay with it when a future progressive president uses the same statutes to build windmill farms, high speed rail, or whatever, even if they do that right after a Republican congress refuses funds for it? You will still say the president really does have that power?
If so, I hope you like Fight 93 elections. I never bought into that, but if executive power keeps expanding, they are going to become the norm.
And how many coals mines, pipelines and border check points will be shut down as a part of our future national emergency when the next Democrat occupies the office?
You don’t think a strong president could not have rolled the “idiot twins” and bent them to his will, if he had exerted his will? Historically, the president, not congress , leads on the presidents priorities. But if you want to think that Trump is a weak puppet of Ryan and McConnell, go ahead. I actually think higher of the president and his capabilities than that.
Can we call it a “collective fail” then? (i.e. everybody f’ed up.)
It sure seems like the big cases are decided on politics and not the arguments. Didn’t Robert’s create the “ACA penalty is really a tax” argument after the courtroom presentations?
Anyway, Trump has a the statutory power to declare an emergency. That changes very little in what is allowed to done. It is symbolic and has a greater effect on politics than actual security.
AKA British Shaggy, right? (although he’s now an American citizen.)
The Trumpers can say whatever they want. And so can I. I do think it makes sense for the Trumpers to develop their best arguments on this. which wont happen without self criticism. They seem to have botched the entire wall funding process so far and are desperately looking for “RINO” scapegoats
Going to? They already are.
How would any of those qualify as “construction projects” under the statute in question?
Thats the opposite of deciding on politics. Roberts decided with the Democrats on ACA, even though he’s normally pro-Republican. So he didn’t reflexively go with the GOP, which is what you should want in this wall case.
If “emergency” can mean whatever the president wants it to, why can’t “construction?”
Politics are, to a large degree, the art of making the mud stick to someone else. This is nothing new.