Malinowski Castigates Trump’s Emergency Declaration

Today Representative Malinowski addressed the house floor to speak in favor of H.J. Res. 46, Privileged Resolution to Terminate President Trump’s

Unlawful Emergency Declaration. View his remarks here. Text below.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to urge that we come together today to defend the Constitution of the United States by repudiating President Trump’s emergency declaration of February 15th.

Few provisions of the Constitution are more plain than Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7:  “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The president has immense powers, but he cannot spend money unless we, the people’s representatives in Congress, have agreed that he can.

Now there might be extraordinary circumstances when a president could violate that principle, when all of us would agree that he must act but there is no time to ask Congress for funds – a military invasion, a massive natural disaster, for example. The National Emergencies Act provides for that.

But if the situation on the southern border were that kind of emergency, the president hasn’t been acting like it. For two years, when his party controlled the House and Senate, he did not ask for money to build a wall. And if we truly faced that kind of imminent threat, a wall would not be an emergency measure, given how many years it would take to build.

But the critical point is this: when the president finally did get around to asking Congress for money, we deliberated on his request, and we said no. You may believe we were right, or you may believe we were wrong, but that is what the elected representatives of the American people decided.

So the question before us today is not how do we secure the border, which reasonable Americans will continue to debate. It is whether this president or any president can use emergency powers to defy Congress when he disagrees with a decision we have made. Are we going to stand by and watch this president seize funds from the military to forcibly take land from law abiding American citizens to build something that Congress has said should not be built?

We know that this would be wrong. The Emergencies Act is for genuine emergencies; it is not a get-out-of-the-Constitution-free card for presidents who want something that Congress won’t give them.

Now, I’ve heard some people say that President Obama did the same thing. I’m sorry, but no he didn’t. Both President Obama and President Bush were sometimes accused of exceeding their constitutional authority; the courts sometimes overruled both of them. But neither Obama nor Bush nor Nixon nor Reagan nor Roosevelt nor Lincoln nor any past president going back to the founding of our republic ever decreed an emergency to spend money that Congress explicitly denied them.

If you want to find a precedent for what President Trump has done, I can give you one – and this is one reason I feel so strongly that we must act today. When I was a diplomat representing our country and standing up for our values around the world, I went toe to toe with dictators – in Egypt, in Ethiopia, in Bahrain – on this very issue — telling them, do not use emergency powers to get around your constitutions. I never thought I would have that kind of argument with the President of the United States.

Many of my Republican colleagues have been saying that America must not go the way of Venezuela; I got on my feet with them and cheered when President Trump said in his State of the Union that we must never become a socialist country. How do you think Venezuela got to be a socialist country? I’ll tell you – President Maduro declared a state of economic emergency to give himself the power to defy his elected national assembly and spend money however he pleased.

That’s not America. We must never become that.

We believe in rule of law not rule by decree.

We disagree passionately within the boundaries the Constitution draws, but we agree zealously to guard those boundaries.

That is how we have survived as a constitutional democracy.

We are divided enough right now.  So please, let’s not allow another tear in the constitutional fabric that keeps us together.  Let’s unite as patriots on this one question, so that we can safely disagree as partisans about everything else.