Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) had a blunt assessment after President Donald Trump doubled down on his threat to declare a national emergency in order to build his border wall: Trump “doesn’t have the power.”Before leaving for Camp David on Sunday, the president told reporters that he was considering using emergency powers to build a wall on the southern border, the funding for which Congress has refused to provide. “If Harry Truman couldn’t nationalize the steel industry during wartime, this president doesn’t have the power to declare an emergency and build a multibillion-dollar wall on the border,” Schiff said on Tapper’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “So that’s a nonstarter.”Truman had cited a national emergency during the Korean War to take control of the steel industry in 1952, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his executive order. Trump first floated the national emergency idea during a press conference Friday, but whether he can actually do so is a gray area, legal experts told NBC News. “My instinct is to say that if he declares a national emergency and uses this pot of unappropriated money for the wall, he’s on very solid legal ground,” Tushnet said.

Source: Huffington Post January 06, 2019 23:37 UTC