US president Donald Trump formally declared a national emergency on Friday to fund his long-promised border wall, in addition to the money allocated for it in a compromise spending bill that he will sign into law later in the day to avert another shutdown of the federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to be signing, today, and registering a national emergency and it\u2019s a great thing to do,\u201d the president said in a long and rambling address from the White House, adding, the purpose was to stop the \u201cinvasion\u201d of drugs and criminals through the border on the south, along Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s neither unprecedented not does it set a precedence, the official insisted, addressing concerns raised by both Democrats and Republicans. \u201cIt actually creates zero precedent,\u201d Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told reporters. \u201cThis is authority given to the president in law already. It\u2019s not as if he didn\u2019t get what he wanted and waved a magic wand to get some money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He dismissed criticism that the emergency declaration was an unprecedented move but added that he could anticipate opposition and legal challenges. And this quote from him was widely cited by experts and critics as something that could be used in the lawsuits: \u201cI didn\u2019t need to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 1,169-page spending bill, which was passed by congress on Thursday, allocated $1.375 billion for the wall, much less than the $5.7 billion Trump had sought. The administration plans to raise about $6.5 billion more through the emergency declaration and other executive action. The target is about $8 billion in all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A national emergency has been declared 58 times before to deal with a variety of issues including the prevention of uncut diamonds from Sierra Leone. And also to raise funds on two occasions, a senior administration official told reported during a briefing to preview the president\u2019s announcements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Congressional Democrats, who had already announced their opposition to the emergency declaration calling it a \u2018lawless act\u201d, plan to challenge it in the congress and in courts. \u201cThis is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process,\u201d Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democratic senator Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US president Donald Trump formally declared a national emergency on Friday to fund his long-promised border wall, in addition to the money allocated for it in a compromise spending bill that he will sign into law later in the day to avert another shutdown of the federal government. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be signing, today, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":55143,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55144,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55142\/revisions\/55144"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}