Does Trump's National Emergency Set A Problematic Precedent For Conservatives?
President Trump has declared a national emergency to obtain funding to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, after lawmakers did not approve the $5.7 billion he’d requested. And in doing so, he has sparked a debate on whether the executive branch can — or should — use its power to unilaterally achieve a policy goal. The president does have an enormous amount of latitude to declare national emergencies, but Trump’s use of the power in this way is unusual and could have far-reaching consequences.
“A Democratic president can declare emergencies as well,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned Republicans on Thursday. “So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans.”
The action raises problems of both principle and precedent for some right-leaning and libertarian legal specialists. But others argue that Trump’s action is probably legal or say they’re not especially worried about potential consequences down the line.
First of all, some legal experts see a fundamental problem with Republicans’ endorsement of a potentially dramatic expansion of executive power. There is a potential case to be made that Trump’s action, regardless of what it means for the future, violates basic principles of limited-government conservatism, which is generally opposed to executive overreach and supportive of a strong separation of powers. “I think it’s problematic in general, regardless of the legality, for the president to stretch his authority under these broad statutory delegations in ways that haven’t been done before,” said David Bernstein, a professor of law at George Mason University. “It gives the president more power to act unilaterally, and that’s not the way our system is supposed to work.”
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/does-trumps-national-emergency-set-a-problematic-precedent-for-conservatives/
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