DELIBERATE DESTABILIZATION: >>>/related/14
As previewed last night, in a national address, Trump said would declare a national emergency to bypass Congress and build $8 billion in barriers on the border, a critical step toward his long-desired wall along the southern border. Trump's move, announced in an improvised address from the Rose Garden, will launch a fierce constitutional battle in the courts with lawmakers and outside groups opposed to his decision.
“I am going to be signing a national emergency,” Trump said after a long introduction to his remarks that touched on trade, China and the caravans of immigrants that Trump made a political issue of ahead of last fall's midterm elections.
“It’s a great thing to do because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” the president said in seeking to justify the need for an emergency declaration.
"People that should have stepped up did not step up… It would have been easy," Trump said of the national emergency to fund the border wall, saying it would have been "great to have done it earlier."
Trump is separately set to sign legislation approved by Congress that funds the government and prevents a new shutdown set to begin on Saturday. But that legislation fell far short of his demands for $5.7 billion in wall funding.
Trump will redirect $3.6 billion in military construction funding toward the border project, and will also take separate executive action repurposing about $2.5 billion from the Defense Department’s drug-interdiction program and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset-forfeiture fund. Officials said the goal is to ultimately build roughly 234 miles of barriers along the border, including bollard-style wall.
Here’s how the $8B for border barrier/wall/fencing breaks down:
- $1.37B — SPENDING BILL
- $600M — TREASURY’S DRUG FORFEITURE FUND
- $2.5B — DEFENSE DEPT DRUG INTERDICTION PROGRAM
- $3.5B — MILITARY CONSTRUCTION BUDGET(POTUS using emergency declaration for this)
— Jessica Smith (@JessicaASmith8) February 15, 2019
The blowback begins, with Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer: "This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process."
To be sure, as Trump himself stated, he "expects to be sued" over the national emergency, and anticiaptes the case will eventually escalate to the Supreme Court.
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zerohedge.com
