Sixteen states and at least six activist groups have filed or are preparing lawsuits taking aim at President Trump’s Feb. 15 emergency declaration that seeks to divert already appropriated government funds to build a wall on the nation’s porous border with Mexico.
This was to be expected. When the Left loses elections, it turns to unelected federal judges to carry out its will.
There is also an effort afoot in Congress to overturn the declaration. If both chambers pass a resolution of disapproval, White House senior adviser Stephen Miller seemed to indicate Sunday that the president would veto it. Trump is “going to protect his national emergency declaration, guaranteed,” Miller said on Fox News Channel.
Of the six activist organizations, four –Public Citizen, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Defenders of Wildlife— have been funded by radical leftist financier George Soros through his philanthropies.
The 16 states seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent Trump from moving forward with wall construction while the case is pending in the courts are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Virginia, according to the Washington Post.
In what is clearly an example of judge-shopping, the states filed at U.S. District Court in Northern California, which is part of the territory covered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit where various judges have issued sweeping injunctions against Trump administration policies.
The legal action accuses Trump of “an unconstitutional and unlawful scheme.” The states say they are attempting “to protect their residents, natural resources, and economic interests from President Donald J. Trump’s flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution.”
The activists have initiated three lawsuits at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., aimed at frustrating President Trump’s efforts to secure the border and halt the long-running invasion of the nation by illegal aliens.
Founded by former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, Public Citizen initiated a lawsuit Friday to strike down the president’s proclamation under the National Emergencies Act, on behalf of the Frontera Audubon Society of Weslaco, Texas, and a group of Texas landowners. The lawsuit claims that endangered species will be harmed if the wall is built.
In its suit CREW is trying to force the Justice Department to hand over internally produced legal opinions “that discuss the power of the president to invoke emergency powers to build a wall or other type of barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico[.]”
Defenders of Wildlife launched a legal action Saturday to freeze the emergency declaration. The Center for Biological Diversity and Animal Legal Defense Fund are also listed in the papers as plaintiffs. Like the suit filed by Public Citizen, this suit alleges endangered species will be adversely affected if the wall goes up.
At time of writing, the national ACLU did not appear to have filed a lawsuit seeking to stay Trump’s emergency declaration, but on Friday the group’s affiliate in Massachusetts filed “a lawsuit demanding information about a contract for a section of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that President Donald Trump said his administration awarded,” the Boston Herald reports. Trump tweeted in December that he “just gave out a 115 mile long contract for another large section of the Wall in Texas.”
On Friday, California’s new leftist governor, sanctuary city fanatic Gavin Newsom (D), said his state would soon hop on the anti-declaration bandwagon.
Soros personally gave money to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and to his campaign for his previous post, lieutenant governor of California, in 2014, according to the California secretary of state’s online campaign finance database.
Many other litigious left-wingers vow to sue to stop the wall. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and other Democrat lawmakers may also sue.
Officials in El Paso County, Texas, say they will litigate. Ditto for the fake libertarians at the Niskanen Center, and the leftists at the Soros-funded Border Network for Human Rights.
The Left and NeverTrumpers in the GOP have suffered a collective nervous breakdown since the declaration was unveiled.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who has called for the in-your-face harassment of Trump administration employees, told MSNBC Friday that there should be nationwide protests over what she called the “fake” emergency declaration.
“And so it’s time for everybody to stand up. All hands on deck to refuse this president these fake emergency powers that he would like to have. And so I’m urging everybody get together —rally in every community across this country all this weekend, send a message to Washington, D.C., ‘No, Mr. President, we’re not going allow you to do this.”
Soros-funded MoveOn.org called for national protests.
“Donald Trump has declared a #FakeNationalEmergency—an illegal power grab from an unhinged man to push his racist, dangerous policies.”
“We’re mobilizing rapid-response events on Presidents Day—Monday, 2/18—against Trump’s fake crisis and racist deportation force and to stand with immigrant, Muslim, and Black and brown communities to stop Trump’s dangerous and illegal power grab.”
Answering the leftist call for anarchy, on Saturday around 50 protesters, some of whom wore masks, occupied and vandalized the National Border Patrol Museum not far from the border in El Paso, Texas. The demonstrators reportedly hoisted banners reading “No Deportations on Stolen Ground” and shouted “Say it loud, say it clear, Border Patrol kills!”
Twitter is filled with often-strident denunciations of the emergency declaration by GOP pundits inside the Washington Beltway.
NeverTrumper David French of National Review penned an over-the-top column titled “Trump’s Emergency Declaration Is Contemptuous of the Rule of Law,” in which he calls the declaration “a contemptuous document,” and “the proclamation of a monarch, not an argument by a president.”
President Trump invoked the National Emergencies Act Friday as Congress finalized the 1,169-page, $333 billion omnibus spending bill that keeps the government operating until Sept. 30.
The bill, now law, contains $1.375 billion for 55 miles of border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. The emergency declaration would take $6.7 billion in previously allocated funds to build the wall. Included in the already appropriated funds are $600 million from the Department of the Treasury Department, $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense’s anti-drug program, and $3.6 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction budget.
Law professors Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, a left-winger, and John Yoo of UC Berkeley, a conservative, say the president can call upon the statute, which President Gerald Ford signed into law in 1976, to get construction of the wall underway.
President Trump has already invoked the National Emergencies Act three times in his tenure. President Barack Obama invoked the statute no fewer than 10 times. Thirty-one previously-declared presidential emergencies reportedly remain in effect.
“Congress expressly gave presidents the authority to declare such emergencies and act unilaterally,” Turley wrote in a recent column.
The National Emergencies Act gives presidents sweeping authority as well as allowance in federal regulations to declare an “immigration emergency” to deal with an “influx of aliens which either is of such magnitude or exhibits such other characteristics that effective administration of the immigration laws of the United States is beyond the existing capabilities” of immigration authorities “in the affected area or areas,” he wrote. The basis for such an invocation generally includes the “likelihood of continued growth in the magnitude of the influx,” rising criminal activity, as well as high “demands on law enforcement agencies” and “other circumstances.”
Yoo wrote earlier this month that Trump is on especially strong ground because Democrats and Republicans passed a law in 2006 authorizing the building of a border wall.
In Dames & Moore v. Regan (1981), the Supreme Court held “that when Congress broadly delegates a general power to the executive branch in the area of foreign affairs, such as the power to impose economic sanctions, it would not read Congress’s neglect to grant a more specific, related authority as foreclosing the president from exercising that authority. Instead, it would treat Congress’s silence as acquiescence to presidential initiative, especially in times of emergency,” Yoo wrote.
“That is exactly the case here: Congress has authorized a wall and other security measures at the border, it has not passed any law forbidding such a wall, and the president has invoked delegated powers to continue the wall’s construction.”
More lawsuits are coming. Count on it.
And George Soros, the preeminent funder of the Left, will be there writing the checks.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared Feb. 19, 2019, at FrontPageMag.