In a sharp rebuke to Donald Trump, the Senate voted 59 to 41 to reject the president’s “emergency “declaration. All 47 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted to overturn the “emergency” declaration. The “emergency” was declared by Trump after Congress rejected his demand to fund the Border Wall, and it followed a weeks-long shut-down of the Federal government.
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told reporters that he voted to end the “national emergency” because; “Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway.” The senator compared Trump to King George III of Britain saying the “problem with this is that after a Revolutionary War against a king, our nation’s founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power. This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom.”
When Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress and the White House in 2017 and 2018, they had never seriously tried to pass funding for the Wall. While the Wall was a major theme of the 2016 Trump campaign headed by Paul Manafort, it was not widely adopted by others running for office in 2018.
The measure to end the “emergency” has already passed in the House of Representatives and will certainly be vetoed by the president.
