Tag: Emperor Hadrian

With his decision to declare a national emergency on the border and seek to build a border wall by executive fiat, President Trump has guaranteed more high-profile battles and likely more defeats.

What he hasn’t gotten is more fence.

That’s a consistent pattern — Trump opts for fights over actual accomplishments. A year ago, congressional Democrats offered $25 billion for border fencing as part of a broader immigration deal. Trump balked after initially agreeing. Last fall, Senate Democrats approved $1.6 billion to avoid a government shutdown. Trump went for the shutdown instead.

He ended up with $1.375 billion.

Trump went back and forth on whether he would sign the spending bill or precipitate another government shutdown. In the end, he agreed to sign it, but only in conjunction with a national emergency declaration that he hopes to use to divert several billion dollars more.

As Noah Bierman wrote, it’s unclear how much additional fencingTrump will actually be able to build even if his emergency declaration survives court challenges. White House officials say they hope to free up about $6.6 billion which could build or upgrade about 234 miles of fencing. They declined to say how much of that would be new construction.

There’s not a lot Congress can immediately do to block the emergency declaration. As Sarah Wire wrote, Trump could veto any move to block it, and although several Republicans have said they oppose the move, enough will almost surely stand with Trump to prevent the two-thirds vote in both houses needed to overturn a veto.

Environmental laws aren’t much of an impediment, either. As Anna Phillips and Molly O’Toole wrote, the 2006 law which expanded the building of fences along the border explicitly allows the Homeland Security department to waive nearly any environmental law. The administration has aggressively used that power.

But the emergency declaration itself will be vulnerable in court, as Trump said in a long, self-pitying riff during his Rose Garden news conference.

Opponents will almost surely sue, arguing that no emergency exists and that Trump is using the declaration in an unconstitutional effort to bypass Congress’ power to control spending. How that fight will be resolved — probably by the Supreme Court — is anyone’s guess.

In addition to those battles, any building project along the Texas border will involve long fights in court with angry landowners challenging efforts to take their land by eminent domain.

Don’t expect to see a “big, beautiful wall” along the border anytime soon.

But some White House advisors say that’s all beside the point. Trump’s core supporters, they argue, would like to see a wall built, but what they really care most about is seeing Trump fight for their priorities. In that analysis, the fight matters more than the outcome.