NPR Runs Story Admitting Trump’s National Emergency is Justified

How controversial is your typical government issued “state of emergency”? So uncontroversial that Presidents have declared nearly 60 of them (and I doubt most people can name one), 31 of which were still ongoing when Trump signed his most recent (and first controversial) emergency declaration.

It’s only now that President Trump is using a national emergency to build his promised border wall that liberals are crying foul, and some Republicans are pretending to have constitutional concerns, even though protecting national security is one of the few functions of government mandated by our constitution. Congress voted to block the emergency, which Trump vetoed (his first veto of his presidency).

Liberals (and swamp-rat Republicans) may not be happy with Trump using a national emergency as a loophole to build his wall, but even NPR is admitting that a case against it can’t be argued on constitutional grounds.  As one writer admits, probably reluctantly; “Some scholars of presidential emergency powers say there is next to nothing, at least procedurally, that Capitol Hill could do to stop Trump from exercising what lawmakers of all stripes agree is his right to declare a national emergency.”

“Congress chose not to put any substantial — or really any — barriers on the president’s ability to declare a national emergency,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “So if he can really just sign his name to a piece of paper, whether it is a real emergency or not,” she adds, “that creates a state of emergency that gives him access to these special powers that are contained in more than 100 different provisions of law that Congress has passed over the years.”

Goitein’s Brennan Center has compiled a list of 136 statutory powers that Congress grants the occupant of the Oval Office on an emergency basis.

NPR quoted law professor Stephen Vladeck as concurring with Goitein. If NPR is admitting that it’s constitutional I’ll take them at their word, given their usual left-leaning bias.

While liberals would like to dispute that there’s an emergency at the border, they literally can only do so when they’re lying. Consider the following arguments put forth by left-wing publications:

According to the New York Times in an article published in January 2019, the reality is that “Illegal border crossings have been declining for nearly two decades. In 2017, border-crossing apprehensions were at their lowest point since 1971.”

In an article published in November 2018, Politico asked “Immigration crisis? The stats tell a different story,” informing us that “to find a year with fewer border arrests than 2017, you’d have to go all the way back to 1971.”

CNBC reported in February that border crossings were at record lows “as Trump declares a national emergency to build a wall.”

Doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that all those articles are from late-2018 or 2019 and they’re all focussing on 2017? That’s because they’re selectively choosing a point in which border crossings were at their lowest, and ignoring the massive spike over the past year. There was also a surge after Judge Dana Sabraw ended Trump’s “family separation” policy at the border, which had worked as a deterrent. As Conservative Review discovered:

According to Customs and Border Protection’s preliminary figures, 76,325 illegal aliens were apprehended at the border in February, more than any other month in over a decade since the decline of migration from Mexico.

If there’s a crisis on the border – how is declaring a national emergency to stop it not the answer?