What you’re about to see… is a historic moment.
[TRUMP]: “...we're very much working very closely with China and president Xi.”
[HOST]: Not that.
[TRUMP]:”...if you look at Idlib Province in Syria.”
[HOST]: Nope
[TRUMP]:“So, Prime Minister Abe came here…”
[HOST]: Not that either...
But this...
[TRUMP]: “I'm going to be signing a national emergency.
And it's been signed many times before.
It's been signed by other presidents.
There's rarely been a problem.
They sign it; nobody cares. ..”
[HOST]: President Trump is right,
many other presidents have used this power before.
But his declaration isn’t normal.
At all.
Why?
Because by using it to fund his proposed border wall,
he has made it the first time a president has used this power
to pay for policy that had already been rejected by Congress.
[GOITEIN]: “This this is an unprecedented abuse of power
in terms of the president basically saying
that Congress cannot limit him.”
[HOST]: That’s Elizabeth Goitein
from the Brennan Center for Justices.
She’s extensively studied presidential
declarations of National Emergencies.
And she’ll help us better understand
what’s different about Trump’s declaration.
Let's start here, in December 2018:
[TRUMP]: “I am proud to shutdown the government
for border security, Chuck. … I will take the mantle.
I will be the one to shut it down.
I’m not going to blame you for it.”
[HOST]: Trump said he would refuse to sign a budget
into law unless it included $5.7 billion dollars
for his proposed border wall on the U.S. / Mexico border.
Democrats, who took control of
the House of Representatives in January,
refused to give in to the president’s demand.
The result…
a political stalemate and the longest
government shutdown in U.S. history.
Eventually, on February 14th, a budget was passed…
but it did not include funding for the border wall.
That’s when Trump decided to take executive action
to fund his border wall by declaring a “national emergency.”
[GOITEIN]: This president is pushing a very dangerous
vision of constitutional government where
the president gets to do what he wants.
And that's not what the Constitution provides for.
This is dangerous. It's undemocratic.
[HOST]: The declaration allows the president to unilaterally
divert billions of dollars from military construction
projects to fund this border wall.
But now, Trump’s declaration is being
challenged in the courts and Congress.
In a historic vote on February 26th,
the House of Representatives voted to block
a presidential national emergency for the first time ever.
The legislation now moves to the Senate.
[GOITEIN]: I think it's has a good chance of passing the Senate.
At that point of course the president would veto it and
then the chances are overriding that veto are slim to be sure.
[HOST]: That’s because Congress would need
a supermajority vote, two-thirds of both chambers,
to override a presidential veto.
And since some say it’s unlikely
that it will be blocked by Congress,
it will be left up to the courts to
determine whether it’s legal or not.
Right now, 16 states are suing the president for what
they say is an “unconstitutional” use of executive power.
The lawsuit claims the president has used a
“manufactured crisis” to call for an emergency.
[GOITEIN]: “In this case it's very clear from the
president's words and his actions that he is declaring
this emergency for the purpose of getting around Congress…
That's an abuse of power.
[HOST]: What Goitein is saying there…
isn’t really controversial.
In fact, the president even made this point
himself in the very same speech where
he first announced his declaration.
[TRUMP]: “I could do the wall over a longer period of time,
I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster.”
[HOST]: But let’s take a step back.
Despite this announcement being the first of its kind,
presidential declarations of national emergencies
definitely aren’t anything new, or out of the ordinary.
For example, in addition to this most recent one,
President Trump has declared three others during his time in office.
President Obama? He issued 12.
Bush? 13.
And Clinton? 17.
In addition to the recent one,
there are 31 other active national emergencies,
which need to be renewed every year.
The oldest one still in effect is from president
Jimmy Carter in 1979 -- which were sanctions
in response to the Iran hostage crisis.
But when did this type of power first arise?
First, it’s important to know that the
U.S. Constitution doesn’t explicitly give a
president the right to declare a national emergency.
But presidents have taken this type of
unilateral action for some time now --
claiming it’s part of the “executive powers”
granted to them in the constitution.
President Woodrow Wilson was the first president
to declare a national emergency during World War I.
Since then, numerous presidents
have used this type of executive power
-- sometimes in really awful ways.
Take Franklin Roosevelt for example…
He used it to order the internment of over
100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II .
But this type of executive power
has been successfully blocked too.
In the 1950s, the Supreme Court blocked
President Harry Truman’s attempt to nationalize
the steel industry during the the Korean War.
With this type of presidential overreach
fresh in the minds of Congress, it took action
to scale back executive power in the 1970s.
[GOITEIN]: “There had been several just massive
scandals involving executive branch overreach.
For example Watergate,
the bombing of Cambodia during Vietnam,
the CIA's domestic spying programs
and all of these things came to light at around the same time.
And so Congress just decided
to take a very hard look at executive power in general.”
[HOST]: It passed the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
The legislation formalized a president’s ability
to declare national emergencies,
but also aimed to give legislators
the ability to check the president’s power.
But Goitein says since it passed, the law has
failed to limit presidential powers the way it intended to.
And she argues that if Trump’s recent declaration
is allowed to stay in effect, it would set a really dangerous precedent.
[GOITEIN]: It is not by any means the scariest
of the emergency powers that become available
to a president when he declares a national emergency.
There are powers that allow the president simply
by declaring a national emergency to shut down
or take over radio stations. Powers that allow him
to freeze Americans bank accounts and criminalize doing
business with Americans that are designated by the government.
[HOST]: Those examples of potential areas of abuse by a
president are why Goiten says Congress needs to act now
-- not only to place limits on President Trump’s power,
but for those who occupy the office after him as well.