White House Emergency

Here's the emergency.

It's Trump.

Donald Trump made out better than he had right to in budget negotiations, getting over a billion dollars for border security this past week after having reneged on a deal back in December that would have given him even more dough to secure the border with Mexico (notice how no one ever worries about securing the border with Canada?), but he got absolutely no funding for a border wall.  Congress made it clear that it didn't want a wall, as did the American people.  Trump then declared an emergency to divert funding from various sources to go ahead and build it - or "finish it," as he put it, even though none of it has been constructed.  

The money, about $8 billion, would come from the following sources, as reported by CNN:   

• $1.375 billion from the Homeland Security appropriations bill, which cannot be used to build a wall but can be used to build other types of border barriers due to the way the bill is written
• $600 million from the Treasury Department's drug forfeiture fund, which would come from an executive action
• $2.5 billion from the Defense Department's drug interdiction program, which would come from an executive action
• $3.5 billion from the Defense Department's military construction budget, which would require a national emergency

Just one thing - how it is an emergency when Congress didn't feel it was necessary to fund it and Trump had been talking about declaring it an emergency for two weeks?  ( I get the feeling that if Trump had been President in 2001, he would have declared an emergency in response to the World Trade Center/Pentagon attack on September 25.)   And Trump actually contradicted himself by saying he didn't need to declare it but he wanted to expedite it. 

Nancy Pelosi has already asked rhetorically about how Republicans would feel about a Democratic President declaring a national emergency to stop gun violence and climate change - you know, real emergencies!  Of course, the preponderance of absolute weenies currently seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination would suggest the Republicans needn't worry about that.  Several Democratic attorneys general have already declared Trump as a national emergency, suing to stop his declaration from going through. 

Things are about to get more interesting in These States.