President Donald Trump would almost certainly face a legal challenge if he makes good on his threat to get funding for a U. S.-Mexico border wall by declaring a national emergency and circumventing Congress’s purse-strings power.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump would almost certainly face a legal challenge if he makes good on his threat to get funding for a U. S.-Mexico border wall by declaring a national emergency and circumventing Congress’s purse-strings power.
Legal scholars said it was unclear how such a step would play out, but they agreed a court test would likely focus on whether an emergency actually exists on the southern border and on the limits of presidential power over taxpayer funds.
Declaring an emergency would likely put an end to an 18-day partial government shutdown affecting 800,000 federal workers.
It could also result in a long court fight, one possibly stretching into Trump’s 2020 re-election bid and emboldening critics who already accuse him of authoritarian tendencies and unpredictable swerves in policy-making.
Trump triggered the partial shutdown last month by demanding that more than $5 billion in funding to pay for part of his wall be part of any legislation to fully reopen agencies whose funding expired for unrelated reasons on Dec. 22.
When Trump started vowing to build a wall, a promise his supporters cheered on the campaign trail, he pledged Mexico would pay for it. Mexico refused. Now Trump wants U. S. taxpayers to pay for the roughly $23 billion project.
