By declaring a national emergency to build a border wall, President Trump has crossed the Rubicon. He has turned a cheap partisan stunt into a bona fide Constitutional crisis.

Congress this week declined to give Trump all the money he demanded to wall off Mexico from the United States. The president has declared an emergency explicitly to defy the will of Congress and usurp its Constitutional power to raise and spend public money. In his contempt for democratic norms, Trump makes no effort to conceal the fact that the alleged ‘emergency’ on the border is a political contrivance to assert his will. Having failed to extort wall funding from Congress through the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, he is willing to violate the Constitution to get a political ‘win.’

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