Trump sued over border emergency as his owns words may haunt him in court
In suits brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Citizen and 16 U.S. states, President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southern border will now be challenged, as the President predicted.
More interesting is the use of the President’s own words being “used against him,” as they many cite comments Trump made during Friday’s press conference announcing the declaration that he “didn’t need to” declare a national emergency.
“I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster,” Trump said, speaking from the White House Rose Garden. “And I don’t have to do it for the election. I’ve already done a lot of wall, for the election — 2020.”
The group of states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, filed the lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
“We’re going to try to halt the President from violating the Constitution, the separation of powers, from stealing money from Americans and states that has been allocated by Congress, lawfully,” Becerra told CNN’s Kate Bolduan Monday.
Following the declaration, the administration has access to $8.1 billion to build a southwestern border wall, including up to $3.6 billion in DOD funds appropriated for military construction, according to a fact sheet prepared by the administration.
But the president’s comment, according to lawyers for Public Citizen, “conceded that the situation at the southern border does not require a declaration of national emergency.”
“Of the 58 times presidents have previously declared emergencies under the National Emergencies Act, none involved using the emergency powers to fund a policy goal after a president failed to meet that goal through foreign diplomacy (having Mexico pay for the wall) or the congressional appropriations process,” wrote attorneys for the Center for Biological Diversity, citing the comment.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the declaration: “The President’s declaration was made solely out of disagreement with Congress’s decision about the proper funding level, location, and timetable for constructing a border wall,” the lawsuit states. “In fact, there was and is no national emergency to justify the President’s action, only his disagreement with Congress’s duly enacted decisions on the extent and pace of spending on the border wall.”
Trump even joked about this happening: “They will sue us in the 9th Circuit,” Trump told reporters in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. “We will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we’ll get another bad ruling and then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court.”