The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Declares National Emergency To Help Fund Southern Border Wall

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

Calling it "a great thing to do," President Trump declared a national emergency on Friday in order to help finance a long-promised wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. It's a highly unusual move from an unconventional president. This episode: political reporter Asma Khalid, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and Congressional correspondent Susan Davis. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, we've got some big news. The NPR Politics team is going to be hitting the road. We will be in Atlanta, Georgia on March 8th, making a podcast live on stage. And we'd love to see you there. So head to nprpresents.org to grab a ticket. And see you soon. This is Andy Johnson calling in from work at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, to wish NPR Politics a happy Valentine's Day. I'm spending my day as a single person to go listen to Mara Liarsen give a talk at my work.

This podcast was recorded at 12.43 p.m. on Friday, February 15th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but my relationship status probably hasn't. Now here's the show. So heartwarming to hear

that on your Valentine's Day you wanted to hang out and listen to Mara Eliasson. Kudos to you. The best part is, I think this is not the first timestamp we've had where somebody was going to listen to Mara Eliasson. She puts on a good show, people. Well, hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump has declared a national emergency so that he can build a wall on the southern border. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. All right. Well, we're going to get into what a national emergency actually is. But first, let's talk about that speech the president delivered this morning from the Rose Garden of the White House. I will say, listening to it, it seemed slightly like a disorganized stream of consciousness. He began by talking about China and trade, but eventually did move on to the U.S.-Mexico border. And, Tam, you were there, right?

Yes, I was there in the Rose Garden. There was no teleprompter. So if you're wondering why it was going all over the place, in part it's because there was not a script, per se. And did you feel like he was effective in terms of actually getting his eventual message across, which is why he was declaring this national emergency? Well, he didn't really say anything new or different that he hasn't said before about the situation on the southern border. And he sort of buried the lead, as you say, because he spent a lot of time talking about other things. Eventually, he did get around to saying that he was declaring an emergency, and this is how he explained it. So I'm going to be signing a national emergency,

and it's been signed many times before. It's been signed by other presidents from 1977 or so. It gave the presidents the power. There's rarely been a problem. They signed it. Nobody cares. I guess they weren't very exciting. So he's referring to the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which gives the president a lot of power to declare a national emergency. And since then, as he says, there have been a few dozen emergencies declared. A lot of them are related to terrorism or other financial issues overseas. There have been others that are domestically related. None of them have been declared to go

around the expressed will of Congress. I mean, just to be clear, on this day, the president is expected to sign a bill that funds the government and doesn't give him all the money he wanted. And he is saying, well, Congress didn't give me what I wanted. So I'm going to declare an emergency and go around Congress, go around the fundamental constitutional role of Congress of holding the purse strings in the country. And I'm going to get the money some other way. So just remind folks what actually is in this deal that Tam's referring to. The border deal that Congress is sending the president was a bipartisan deal that would provide nearly $1.4 billion for physical barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border. That covers about 55 miles of new fencing. So he did indeed get

Congress to concede to some border wall funding. They just did not, on a bipartisan basis, agree that $5.7 billion was necessary this year. Remember, all of this is done on an annual funding basis. So it's just an immediate funding need, not a forever need. And this is what he's been saying he needs all along, right? For a while, he's been saying, I need $5.7 billion for this wall. And he's going even above and beyond that. He had asked Congress for $5.7. They came back to him with $1.4. And now he's going outside the bounds of potentially the law and the Constitution to say, I'm going to get $8 and I'm going to build, I believe it's 234 miles of wall that he is seeking to build.

So where is all this money coming from? I mean, it's a lot of money that you're describing there. Well, funny that you should ask. We have a pretty good sense now of where they think they're going to get this money. There's the $1.375 billion that Sue was talking about. That was in the spending bill that the president is signing. $600 million will come from a treasury forfeiture fund. So that doesn't require the emergency. And then about $2.5 billion will come from counter-drug activities of the Department of Defense. Now, what's interesting about this money is that it actually does allow the military to build border fencing in high traffic drug areas. But that will actually limit where the administration can put the wall that they're going to build. OK. And then the thing that requires a national emergency is three point six billion dollars that they will take from military construction funds. And that money has already

been set aside by Congress to do things like build barracks or new hangars for the F-35 or family housing. Lots and lots and lots of small projects in districts all over the country. I mean, this is an epic clash that the president is setting up right here. He is essentially declaring that Congress doesn't get to say how they spend their money, which is what the Constitution says Congress gets to do. There will be a court challenge to all of this. But if the president is successful here, it could open up an entirely new frontier when it comes to executive power. And that is why this is going to be a much bigger clash than just being about the border wall. Yes, it's going to continue the border and immigration fight, but it has now become so much bigger than that.

Well, and one remarkable thing that he said was he was sort of describing where these funds would come from. Someone asked him, like, wait, aren't you the one who says you want money to go to the military? And he says, you know, I talked to some people and they described the projects to me and they didn't sound too important to me. What's fascinating is that the president is saying that he's going to take money out of the military construction budget. As Tam noted, that covers military housing. This same week on Capitol Hill, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing about a crisis in military family housing. And the chiefs of the military came up and essentially apologized to Congress about the status of family housing on military barracks. And so now at the same time, to be taking from that budget, I think there is a

very good chance that people are going to be hearing a lot more about the crisis in military housing, as that is the pot of money that the president is now seeking to move toward an issue that is, quite frankly, very debatable whether or not it is actually a crisis. I think the other thing that confuses me is just how politically judicious this is, even for the president's base, right? We know it's obviously alienating, or if it's not already alienated, many Democrats and independents, but the president relied on kind of key constituencies in his base. One are folks who really believed that sort of in a nativist vision, right,

and really wanted a border wall. But another key group of supporters of his were veterans. And he's talked a lot about the military and how much the military matters to him. And you're describing a situation now where he's essentially taking funding away from the military to placate another portion of his base. Now, what he says is it's not that much money that I'm taking away from the military. And, you know, again, he's arguing like the wall is the be all and end all. The wall is going to solve the problems at the border. You know, there are a lot of experts on this who think that there are better ways to solve the actual problems that exist at the border. And there is a point to be made about that.

The president is accurate in saying that there is problems about drugs coming into the country. Absolutely. That there is a humanitarian crisis at the border with people seeking asylum. What is debatable is whether the remedy to those problems is to build more barrier fencing. And I do not believe, well, there's certainly not any consensus in the Congress about that, and nor is there consensus in the public. And this is why his National Emergency Declaration is another one of these norm-busting actions, is he's taking something, the powers to declare a national emergency, that are generally used in

non-controversial situations and making that power controversial too. You know, one thing that caught my ear when listening to President Trump non-controversial situations and making that power controversial too. You know, one thing that caught my ear when listening to President Trump was this acknowledgement of the fact that he really, he didn't need to do this, essentially, he said. I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster. And I don't have to do it for the election. I've already done a lot of wall for the election, 2020. And the only reason we're up here talking about this is because of the election, because they want to try and win an

election, which it looks like they're not going to be able to do. And this is one of the ways they think they can possibly win is by obstruction and a lot of other nonsense. And I think that I just want to get it done faster. That's all. I think that's the part of the press conference where you're thinking, is he saying out loud the thing you're not supposed to say out loud? He does that a lot. He does exactly what he's thinking about. Even if legal advisors are probably like pulling their hair out right at that moment. This does not strengthen your case if you're trying to say that I need a national emergency. I think that's a really substantive question here

is, is the president undermining his own legal argument if these are comments that his opponents are going to use in court proceedings to prove that it is not, in fact, a national emergency? Well, all right. There are going to be some challenges to this and some pushback from Congress. We'll talk about all of that when we get back from a quick break. Abby Jacobson was terrified to write a book. I pitched it with like trembling hands. Really? To make myself do this because it scared the out of me.

The stories behind the celebrity. Every Tuesday on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we're back. And let's talk about how Congress is going to respond to this national emergency, because I will say already, we're hearing from Democrats who say that this is nothing more than a vanity project, the border wall of the president's. So, Sue, do we have a sense that the congressional leadership is planning, especially on the Democratic side, I should say, to challenge the president. Oh, yeah. Before the president was even done speaking, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer put out a joint statement in which they said Congress would, quote, defend our constitutional authorities in the Congress, in the courts and in the public using every remedy available. So what are those remedies? So on the congressional front, they have a legislative option. The same law that gave the president the authority to declare a national emergency gives Congress the power to take it away. It is a special fast track process they could use that essentially

both chambers of the House and Senate have to pass a resolution disapproving of the president's actions. The key here is you would probably need a veto proof majority to get that through because presumably the president would veto that. Unlikely, you're going need a veto-proof majority to get that through because presumably the president would veto that. Unlikely, you're going to have veto-proof with Republicans still control of the Senate, although we'll talk about Republicans may not be super comfortable with this either. Just to put a point on what Sue said, in the 46 years that this law has been on the books, Congress has never taken a vote on one of these resolutions to terminate a presidential emergency. And it's not that necessarily that Congress has been shirking its oversight responsibilities,

though people could make that argument. It's that they've never had to. The Emergency Act has never been used in a way that prompted a congressional backlash in quite this way. There was only one instance where one congressman introduced a resolution and then the president back legal authority of the president to redirect constitutionally appropriated funds. And that is going to be a fascinating clash of power that could take a very long time to play out. And let me just add that the state of California is already promising to sue. And, you know, that doesn't even get to the landowners whose land could be taken to build fencing. There could be just a mountain of lawsuits in the months and weeks ahead, which the president actually acknowledged in the Rose Garden.

And we will have a national emergency and we will then be sued and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn't be there. And 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 and hopefully we'll get a fair shake and we'll win in the Supreme Court, just like the ban. And that is how a bill becomes a law now. He's doing something that he knows is going to be blocked, at least for some extended period of time. And he's doing it anyway. I do think there is a cynical political argument you can make about this action and that it's so clear that this is going to be challenged in the courts and that it's going to get tied up in legislation, that it's unclear that that this is going to be challenged in the courts and that it's going to get tied up in legislation, that it's unclear that if this action will ever ultimately result in fence being built or wall being built.

But I do think it gives the president the political ground to say, I did everything possible to finish the wall, to build the wall. And so promise. Yeah. And that and that has been he has made very clear where that is in his priorities. So I don't know if the legal challenge, you know, if he loses in the courts, then what he did today won't actually result in 234 miles of wall being built along the border. But does that matter politically? Because he will get to campaign saying, I literally have done I have stretched the boundaries of the law to build that wall. Though, we should remind listeners that, you know, part of his promise for this wall is that he would tell voters that Mexico would pay for it. He never said, we'll pay for it by moving money around. We'll pay for it, but Congress won't give me the money. Mexico won't give me the money.

Congress won't give me the money. And so, well, I'll just take it anyway. And it's not cheap. I mean, one mile of wall costs about $25 million and those are taxpayer dollars. So it's not a small pot of money that we're talking about when you talk about $8 billion to do a project that is very questionable in how much it's needed right away. And that's only a third of what they say is ultimately needed. So let's talk a bit about Republicans, because you kind of teased that for us a little earlier, saying that there are some Republicans who have been opposed to this idea of a national emergency. Where are they now? And can we expect for some of them to maybe align with some of the Democrats? important Republicans is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in announcing this news yesterday said he would support the president in this national emergency declaration, which came as quite a shock to many of us who cover Capitol Hill, because we know that McConnell

privately had been urging the White House and urging the president not to do this because he did not want to have this clash with the Congress and legal fight over the national emergency declaration. Politically, he's going to get on board and get behind the president once the president decides this is the plan forward. It's unclear how many Republicans may split from the White House, but there are many prominent ones voicing reservations. People like Susan Collins of Maine, who's a moderate, who's up for reelection in 2020. People like Marco Rubio of Florida's Republican senator who have been making the

conservative case that, you know, once you break a precedent, you break it for all future presidents too. So you might like President Trump using it to build a wall, but would you like President Kamala Harris doing it for gun legislation? There are things at play here that are bigger than this moment. And so from a conservative standpoint, from a philosophical conservative standpoint, this is a terrible thing if executive overreach is a concern of yours. If you're trying to restrain the power of the presidency, this is a power grab by the presidency. It's a conservative argument, though, that when we talk about executive authority, that they see sort of some similarities between this and,

say, what President Obama did when he came up with his executive actions to allow deferred action for childhood arrivals. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, this question of executive authority has been increasingly debated, I would say, probably since 9-11, because it really started with President Bush, who also stretched bounds of executive authority to keep the country safe. That would be their argument after 9-11. President Obama did it on immigration when he went around Congress and created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That was an argument he made that he was forced to act because Congress couldn't or wouldn't, that they were so politically immobilized by the issue. And it was an urgent problem that he stretched the bounds of executive authority. DACA is still being challenged

in the courts, right? Republicans did challenge that. His political opponents did challenge that. I think if you were opposed philosophically to what Obama did on DACA, there is a through line to what President Trump did today on the wall. And there are just a couple of things that are slightly different about what Obama did. They did it through what they argued was prosecutorial discretion. They claimed that they weren't making a law. They were just making enforcement choices. Now, lots of people disagreed with their analysis, but that's what they were arguing. And the president didn't declare an emergency. He didn't even do an executive order. It was all done administratively through the Department of Homeland Security. You know, President Obama and President Trump have something in common in that

there's something to the argument that they have both created these power grabs, if you want to call it that, because Congress hasn't acted. And on the issue of immigration, the legislative branch has been essentially atrophied for the better part of the past 20 years. And that atrophy and inability to address any number of big immigration questions affecting this country has shifted a power to another branch of government when one isn't acting. So inaction from Congress has emboldened presidents on the issue of immigration to take action they could not have otherwise taken if Congress had done its job. So I think as a bit of a Congress nerd and as a civics nerd, so much about this is fascinating to me because it's so much bigger than the wall. It's about how your government functions and how your government

will function going forward. All right, that is a wrap for today. A reminder that we will be in Atlanta, Georgia on March 8th for a live show. You can grab a ticket by heading to nprpresents.org. We'd love to see you there. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.