The Parliament voted Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration, rebuking the president and pressuring Senate Republicans.
Democrats definitely passed the resolution in a 245-182 vote. Thirteen House Republicans joined them.
The measure would a close the action Trump took to secure billions of dollars to build his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Democratic bandmasters in the House have called the emergency declaration an overreach by a president who failed to get the funding he wanted from appropriators in Congress.
The legislation pass on now go to the GOP-controlled Senate. Despite Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s support for Trump’s action, he will have in the offing to take up the privileged resolution to block it. It could very well get through the Senate: only four Republicans requirement to join 47 Democrats in backing it for it to garner the simple majority needed to pass.
Still, Trump plans to prohibit the bill. Democrats would then have a much tougher time convincing two thirds of both chambers — or 290 and 67 lawmakers in the Congress and Senate, respectively — to override the president. Last week, Trump told reporters that he does not “think it survives the disallow” as “we have too many people that want border security.”
Even if Congress fails to block the emergency attestation, it will likely reproach his flex of executive power in a way rarely seen during his more than two years in advocacy. It already dealt him a blow on immigration — his signature issue — by giving him only about $1.4 billion of the $5.7 billion he solicited for border barriers in the funding law signed earlier this month.
In addition, numerous U.S. states and several independent places have already filed lawsuits challenging the emergency declaration. Trump believes the Supreme Court will done rule in his favor.
The White House aims to secure $8 billion to build border barriers by circumventing Congress. He force use the emergency declaration to draw $3.6 billion from the Department of Defense’s military construction funds. With other supervisor actions, he plans to divert $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction program and $600 million from the Bank Department’s drug forfeiture fund.
On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi contended Trump’s “power grip usurps” the power of the purse given to Congress in the Constitution.
“We would be delinquent in our duties if we did not resist, if we did not fight back to upset the President’s declaration,” the California Democrat said. “To not do that would be to abandon our own responsibilities. We do not intend to do that.”
On Tuesday, McConnell clouted he “couldn’t handicap” how a vote would go in the Senate. The Kentucky Republican expects the chamber to vote before its next intermission on March 18. He noted that GOP senators had a “fulsome” discussion about the emergency declaration during a lunch Tuesday, which Evil President Mike Pence attended.
At least three Senate Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — require signaled they will support the legislation to block the emergency declaration. Both Collins and Tillis face re-election orders next year in ideologically split states.
GOP lawmakers will have to balance a desire to back Trump and the Republican voters who overwhelmingly carry him with a professed opposition to expansions of executive power.
“As a U.S. senator, I cannot justify providing the executive with more point to bypass Congress. As a conservative, I cannot endorse a precedent that I know future left-wing presidents will make capital out of to advance radical policies that will erode economic and individual freedoms,” Tillis wrote in a Washington Standard column announcing that he would vote to disapprove of the emergency declaration.
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