Trump dichiara l’emergenza. Ma la vera notizia non è questa.

Giuseppe Sandro Mela.

2019-02-16.

«The US president described the situation at the Mexico border as a national security crisis that requires a wall, saying “it’s a great thing to do, because we have an invasion.” He said he is ready for legal challenges.»

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«US President Donald Trump said on Friday he would declare a national emergency at the US border with Mexico in a bid to appropriate money to build his so-called border wall.»

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«In a lengthy address from the Rose Garden that also touched on trade with China, Trump said the emergency declaration was a response to “the national security crisis on our southern border.”»

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The White House.

«President Trump is taking Executive action to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at our Southern Border.»

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«President Trump is using his legal authority to take Executive action to secure additional resources, just as he promised.  In part, he is declaring a national emergency that makes available additional troops and funding for military construction.»

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«Including funding in Homeland Security appropriations, the Administration has so far identified up to $8.1 billion that will be available to build the border wall once a national emergency is declared and additional funds have been reprogrammed, including:

– About $601 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund

– Up to $2.5 billion under the Department of Defense funds transferred for Support for Counterdrug Activities (Title 10 United States Code, section 284)

– Up to $3.6 billion reallocated from Department of Defense military construction projects under the President’s declaration of a national emergency (Title 10 United States Code, section 2808) ….»

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«The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and the Army Corps of Engineers are working to create a prioritized list of segments and a work plan for the remainder of FY 2019 and beyond.»

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«Donald Trump announces emergency at US border to build wall»

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Qualcuno dovrebbe spiegare ai liberal democratici, con tanta pazienza, che gli Stati Uniti sono una Federazione presidenziale: è il Presidente ad assumersi l’onere del Governo, non i media, non le piazze.

Nella politica muro contro muro, alla fine è il Presidente che ha gli strumenti legali per agire.

A  seguito riportiamo anche il lacrimoso editoriale del The New York Times.

Ma come al solito, la vera notizia, quella che conta, è riportata tra gli annunci pubblicitari.

Supreme Court to Hear Case on Census Citizenship Question

«The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether the Trump administration may add a question about citizenship to the next census questionnaire.

Critics say that adding the question would undermine the accuracy of the census, because both legal and unauthorized immigrants might refuse to fill out the form. By one government estimate, about 6.5 million people might decide not to participate.

That could reduce Democratic representation when congressional districts are drawn in 2021 and affect the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending.

The Supreme Court stepped in before any appeals court had ruled on the matter, and it put the case on an unusually fast track, scheduling arguments for April so that it can issue a decision before census forms are printed in June.»

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Ovviamente nessuno può al momento sapere cosa deciderà la Suprema Corte.

Nel caso però che desse parere favorevole, i liberal democratici avrebbero perso in un sol colpo decine di milioni di voti che ottenevano facendo votare gli immigrati clandestini come se fossero stati cittadini americani. Esattamente come faceva Al Capone a Cicero.

Sarebbe la loro Midway.

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→ TheWhite House. 2019-02-15. President Donald J. Trump’s Border Security Victory

«I will never waver from my sacred duty to defend this Nation and its people. We will get the job done» .

President Donald J. Trump

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SECURING OUR BORDER: President Donald J. Trump is following through on his promise to secure the border with legislation and Executive action.

– President Trump was elected partly on his promise to secure the Southern Border with a barrier and, since his first day in office, he has been following through on that promise.

– As the President has said, sections of the border wall are already being built, and legislation and Executive actions are building on that progress.

– Executive action being taken by the President makes available additional funding to secure our border that is essential to our national security.

LEGISLATIVE WINS: President Trump secured a number of significant legislative victories in the Homeland Security appropriations bill that further his effort to secure the Southern Border and protect our country.

– The funding bill contains robust resources and additional provisions to secure the border and strengthen immigration enforcement.

– The bill provides $1.375 billion for approximately 55 miles of border barrier in highly dangerous and drug smuggling areas in the Rio Grande Valley, where it is desperately needed.

— More than 40 percent of all border apprehensions occurred in the Rio Grande Valley sector in fiscal year (FY) 2018.

The Rio Grande Valley was the border sector with the most known deaths of illegal border crossers in FY 2018.

– $415 million will go toward addressing the humanitarian crisis at the border by providing medical care, transportation, processing centers, and consumables.

– President Trump successfully rejected efforts by some to undercut Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) ability to uphold our laws and detain illegal aliens, including criminals.

ICE funding supports nearly 5,000 additional beds to detain illegal aliens and keep criminals off our streets.

Customs and Border Protection will receive funding for 600 additional officers.

This bill will help keep deadly drugs out of our communities by increasing drug detection at ports of entry, including opioid detection staffing, labs, and equipment.

A PROMISE TO ACT: President Trump is taking Executive action to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at our Southern Border.  

President Trump is using his legal authority to take Executive action to secure additional resources, just as he promised.  In part, he is declaring a national emergency that makes available additional troops and funding for military construction.

Including funding in Homeland Security appropriations, the Administration has so far identified up to $8.1 billion that will be available to build the border wall once a national emergency is declared and additional funds have been reprogrammed, including:

About $601 million from the Treasury Forfeiture Fund

Up to $2.5 billion under the Department of Defense funds transferred for Support for Counterdrug Activities (Title 10 United States Code, section 284)

Up to $3.6 billion reallocated from Department of Defense military construction projects under the President’s declaration of a national emergency (Title 10 United States Code, section 2808)

These funding sources will be used sequentially and as needed.

The Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and the Army Corps of Engineers are working to create a prioritized list of segments and a work plan for the remainder of FY 2019 and beyond.

New projects could include: new levee wall, new and replacement primary pedestrian barrier, new vehicle-to-pedestrian barrier, and new secondary barrier.

NATIONAL EMERGENCY ON OUR BORDER: The President is using his clear authority to declare a national emergency as allowed under the National Emergencies Act.

Since 1976, presidents have declared nearly 60 national emergencies.

Most of the previously declared national emergencies have been continually renewed and are still in effect, after being continually renewed.

Multiple Governors have declared states of emergency along the border in the past.

Former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, who became President Obama’s DHS Secretary, declared a state of emergency along the border in 2005.

Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson also declared a state of emergency at the border in 2005.

Former President George W. Bush and former President Obama both directed the use of the military to assist DHS in securing and managing the Southern Border.

Former President Bush declared a national emergency in 2001, which invoked reprogramming authority granted by Title 10 United States Code, section 2808, and both he and former President Obama used that authority a total of 18 times to fund projects between 2001 and 2014.

ADDRESSING THE CRISIS AT HAND: President Trump is taking the necessary steps to address the crisis at our Southern Border and stop crime and drugs from flooding into our Nation.

Cartels, traffickers, and gangs, like the vile MS-13 gang, have taken advantage of our weak borders for their own gain.

Immigration officers have made 266,000 arrests of criminal aliens in the last two fiscal years.

This includes aliens charged or convicted of approximately 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 killings.

Tons of deadly drugs have flooded across the border and into our communities, taking countless American lives.

Methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl all flow across our Southern Border and destroy our communities.

More than 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2017 alone.

Human traffickers exploit our borders to traffic young girls and women into our country and sell them into prostitution and slavery.

Massive caravans of migrants view our unsecure border as a way to gain illegal entry into our country and take advantage of our nonsensical immigration loopholes.

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→ The News York Times. 2019-02-15. Trump Declares National Emergency to Build Border Wall

After declaring a national emergency to build a border wall, President Trump said he “didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.” The move bypasses Congress.

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WASHINGTON — President Trump declared a national emergency at the border on Friday to access billions of dollars to build a border wall that Congress refused to give him, transforming a highly charged policy dispute into a fundamental confrontation over separation of powers.

In a televised announcement in the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said he would sign the declaration to protect the country from the flow of drugs, criminals and illegal immigrants coming across the border from Mexico, which he characterized as a profound threat to national security.

“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border and we’re going to do it one way or the other,” he said. “It’s an invasion,” he added. “We have an invasion of drugs and criminals coming into our country.”

But as he sought to deny that he was taking action because he could not persuade Congress to give him the money, he may have undercut his own argument that the border situation required urgent unilateral action. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it faster,” he said. “I want to get it done faster, that’s all.”

The announcement came during a freewheeling appearance in which Mr. Trump ping-ponged from topic to topic, touching on the economy, China trade talks and his coming summit meeting with North Korea’s leader. He again suggested that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize and reviewed which conservative commentators had been supportive of him, dismissing Ann Coulter, who has not.

Sounding alternately defensive and aggrieved, Mr. Trump refused to accept that he lost his two-month drive to press Congress to give him the border wall money he demanded even as he criticized former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, without naming him, for failing to provide the funding when Republicans controlled the House. Mr. Trump’s speech and answers to questions were replete with misinformation and, when challenged by reporters, he refused to accept statistics produced by his own government that conflicted with his narrative.

“The numbers you gave are wrong,” he told one reporter. “It’s a fake question.”

On point after point, he insisted that he would be proved correct and his doubters proved wrong. “People said, ‘Trump is crazy,’” he said at one point, discussing his outreach to Kim Jong-un of North Korea, “and you know what? It ended up being a very good relationship.”

The border emergency declaration, which Mr. Trump signed later in the day, enables Mr. Trump to divert $3.6 billion budgeted for military construction projects to the border wall, White House officials said. Mr. Trump will also use more traditional presidential budgetary discretion to tap $2.5 billion from counternarcotics programs and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund.

Combined with the $1.375 billion authorized for fencing in a spending package passed by Congress on Thursday night, Mr. Trump would then have about $8 billion in all to advance construction of new barriers and repairs or replacement of existing barriers along the border this year, significantly more than the $5.7 billion that Congress refused to give him.

The president’s decision, previewed on Thursday, incited instant condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans, who called it an unconstitutional abuse of his authority.

“This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed president, who has gone outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said in a joint statement.

The two vowed to try to overturn the decision, appealing to Republicans to join them. “The president is not above the law,” they said. “The Congress cannot let the president shred the Constitution.”

House Democrats plan to introduce legislation to block the president’s move, which could pass both houses if it wins the votes of the half-dozen Republican senators who had criticized the planned declaration. That would put the president in the position of issuing the first veto of his presidency.

In addition to a legislative effort to stop Mr. Trump, the issue will almost certainly be taken to court, either by congressional Democrats, liberal advocacy groups or both. Legal experts have said the administration can make serious arguments to justify its move, but added that courts may decide that it is stretching the intent of the law. The Supreme Court is controlled by a five-member conservative bloc but in recent years has reined in Republican and Democratic presidents who were judged to be exceeding their authority.

White House officials rejected critics who said Mr. Trump was creating a precedent that future presidents could use to ignore the will of Congress. Republicans have expressed concern that a Democratic commander in chief could cite Mr. Trump’s move to declare a national emergency over gun violence or climate change without legislation from Congress.

“It actually creates zero precedent,” Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told reporters on Friday morning. “This is authority given to the president in law already. It’s not as if he didn’t get what he wanted and waved a magic wand to get some money.”

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Presidents have declared national emergencies under a 1970s-era law about five dozen times and 31 of those emergencies remain active, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. But most of them dealt with foreign crises and involved freezing property, blocking trade or exports or taking other actions against national adversaries, not redirecting money without explicit congressional authorization.

White House officials cited only two times that such emergency declarations were used by presidents to spend money without legislative approval — once by President George Bush in 1990 during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War and again by his son, President George W. Bush, in 2001 after the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

In both of those cases, the presidents were responding to new events — the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Al Qaeda’s assault on America — and were moving military money around to use for military purposes. Neither was taking action specifically rejected by Congress.

In Mr. Trump’s case, he is defining a longstanding problem at the border as an emergency even though illegal crossings have actually fallen in recent years. And unlike either of the Bushes, he is taking action after failing to persuade lawmakers to go along with his plans through the regular process.

The spending package passed by Congress on Thursday after a two-month showdown with the president included none of the $5.7 billion that Mr. Trump demanded for 234 miles of steel wall. Instead, it provided $1.375 billion for about 55 miles of fencing. Mr. Trump agreed to sign the package into law anyway to avoid a second government shutdown after the impasse over border wall funding closed the doors of many federal agencies for 35 days and left 800,000 workers without pay.

White House officials said Mr. Trump signed that spending package later on Friday. Mr. Trump plans to leave Washington on Friday afternoon for a long holiday weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

For weeks, Republicans led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, urged Mr. Trump not to declare a national emergency, but the president opted to go ahead anyway to find a way out of the political corner he had put himself in with the failed effort to force Congress to finance the wall.

Mr. McConnell privately told the president he would support the move despite his own reservations, but warned Mr. Trump that he had about two weeks to win over critical Republicans to avoid having Congress vote to reject the declaration.

Mr. Trump was among those Republicans who criticized President Barack Obama for what they saw as overstepping his executive authority after failing to win policy fights with Congress. “Repubs must not allow Pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress,” Mr. Trump wrote in 2014.