Republican rebuke is a crack in Humpty Dumpty's border wall

Donald Trump's chaotic signature has vetoed the bill he wanted to waste billions of tax dollars on a border wall that he said Mexico was going to pay for!

An echo opinion published by the editorial board of the Bangor Daily News in Maine

Donald Trump lost his way by supporting an expensive and unnecessary board wall doing so just because "he could".  

Although the Republican rebuke of Trump's executive and selfish overreach may not override his stupid EKG style veto signature, the fact is, there is a crack in his political Humpty Dumpty veneer. 

Donald Trump lost his ability to support the unnecessary border wall. Like Humpty Dumpty, Trump the tRumpf, has had a great fall. Although he might scribble his way to a successful veto override, the fact is, his Republican Senators have put a crack in his political veneer.

A dozen Republican U.S. senators bucked Donald Trump by supporting a resolution to negate last month’s emergency declaration, setting up the president’s first veto. 

Trump plans to use the declaration to divert about $8 billion that Congress has already allocated to other purposes toward building more barriers on the southern U.S. border.

Those 12 senators who broke ranks from Trump — including Maine’s Susan Collins, the first Senate Republican to indicate she would support a resolution of disapproval — stood up for the separation of powers in the face of significant political pressure from their own party.

There are two problems with Trump’s emergency declaration. One, the administration has not demonstrated that the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border rises to the level of an emergency. 

Certainly, improvements in border security are warranted, but Trump has undermined his own position by bragging that construction of a border wall is well underway, and saying that he said I “didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster” while announcing the declaration.

Second, and more important, Trump’s plan to reroute billions of dollars approved by Congress for other purposes raises glaring constitutional concerns. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to raise and spend federal funds.

This fundamental problem led Sen. Susan Collins to take the lead in introducing a bipartisan resolution to end the emergency. A House version passed with a bipartisan vote of 245-182 in February.

“Let me be clear: The question before us is not whether to support or oppose the wall, or to support or oppose the president. Rather, it is this: Do we want the executive branch — now or in the future — to hold a power that the Founders deliberately entrusted to Congress?” Senator Collins said on the Senate flooron Feb.28. 

"It has been said that Congress’s most precious power is the power in the purse — set out in plain language in … our Constitution.”

“The president’s emergency declaration is ill-advised precisely because it attempts to short-cut the process of checks and balances by usurping Congress’s authority,” she added. “This resolution blocks that overreach, and nothing more.”

As an example of that overreach, Collins cited work at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery that would stop if the president took money away from these projects to pay for border wall construction.

The rest of Maine’s congressional delegation — Sen. Angus King and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden — similarly stood up for Congress’ constitutional authority by backing the resolution.

Despite securing enough support in both houses, the 59 votes for the resolution in the Senate is still not enough to override the veto Trump issued Friday. It is his first veto. That leaves the courts as the next step for debate over the emergency declaration.

It was, however, a fight worth having because Congress is long overdue in reasserting its status as a co-equal branch of government.

“Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway,” Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee explained after the vote, also noting that he generally supports the president on border security. 

“The problem with this is that after a Revolutionary War against a king, our nation’s founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power. This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom.”

If nothing else, the president’s misguided and legally questionable border wall emergency declaration should be a call to action for constitutionalists in both parties to address the overly broad scope and use of the National Emergencies Act. But it could also be much more.

As said before by the Bangor Daily News editorial board, the preferable, if unlikely, way forward here is for Congress to fully reject Trump’s emergency declaration, scale back the extent that the presidency is empowered through the National Emergencies Act, and take another shot at more comprehensive immigration reform — including increased funding for barriers on the southern border, protections for immigrants already here and other needed updates to our immigration system.