Feb. 15, 2019, 7:30 AM EST / Updated Feb. 15, 2019, 12:47 PM EST
By Jonathan Allen

WASHINGTON — Congress knew President Donald Trump thought there was a border crisis when it voted to curb his wall Thursday.

In the arcane language of House and Senate appropriators, endorsed by veto-proof majorities in both chambers, lawmakers said Trump could have no more than $1.375 billion to build 55 new miles of steel fencing. They specifically cited the risk to law enforcement in banning him from constructing solid walls.

It was a resounding and explicit rejection of the idea that there is a national emergency requiring billions of dollars to build a border wall. And that judgment was rendered at a time when Trump has been making a very public case — in speeches, interviews and tweets — that there is a "humanitarian and security crisis" and after he shut down the government for 35 days to make his point ...

Put simply, Congress heard Trump's plea for emergency funding and used its primary authority under the Constitution — the power of the purse — to say no ...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-asked-wall-he-s-forcing-constitutional-crisis-n971911

Updated Feb 15, 11:34 AM
Posted Feb 15, 10:59 AM

By Tim Morris, Columnist
It is time for members of Louisiana’s Republican congressional delegation to stand up for the rule of law and stand against President Donald Trump’s bogus claims of a national emergency to meet his political aims to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Louisiana lawmakers should be ashamed if they don’t stand up to preserve the Constitution’s separation of powers and express conservative opposition to concentrating so much control with one man or office. The very ideals of our democratic republic are at stake here.

The House and the Senate each will have a chance to vote for a resolution that puts Congress on the record against this power grab. The Republicans in the Louisiana delegation have been mostly in lockstep with the president to this point. But this is not about party, it’s about country and the foundation of how our nation works.

You can be for a wall but against an attack on our constitutional system ...

https://www.nola.com/opinions/2019/02/it-is-time-to-stand-against-trump-and-for-the-constitution.html

By Mike Littwin - February 15, 2019

I know it seems early in the game, but the argument over whether there is a real national emergency on the southern border — hint: there isn’t — is already over.

Done. Finished. Finito.

Don’t take my word or the word of any number of experts. For once, and this is the real shocker, you can take Donald Trump’s word.

In a rare moment of Trumpian candor, Trump told the truth about his bogus emergency declaration — with the surprising reveal that there is no emergency at all. In telling the truth, he didn’t just undercut his declaration. He put a knife through the heart of it. He basically conceded that he was, uh, appropriating $7 billion that Congress had appropriated for other uses, much of it from the Pentagon. And he was doing this because Congress — a co-equal branch of government, which constitutionally controls the purse — had overwhelmingly voted that he couldn’t ...

https://www.coloradoindependent.com/2019/02/15/littwin-trump-emergency-mcconnell-gardner-congress/

Jack Crowe
National Review•February 15, 2019

... In a statement provided to National Review, Sasse endorsed President Trump’s claim that a lack of attention to security has created a “crisis” at the southern border, but warned that resolving the issue through a national-emergency declaration would prove counterproductive for conservatives in the future ...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/sasse-warns-trump-national-emergency-232525128.html

By Julian Hernandez and Molly Stellino | Cronkite News
Friday, Feb. 15, 2019

... In a statement, Rep. Tom O’Halleran, D-Flagstaff, said this action would divert resources from the Department of Defense and law enforcement programs to fund a border wall.The statement also said that $3.5 billion from the Pentagon’s military construction fund, $2.5 billion from the Pentagon’s drug interdiction initiative and $600 million from the Department of the Treasury’s drug forfeiture program will be shuffled to fund the construction of the border wall ...

The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, a law and public policy center that specializes in constitutional issues, compiled a list of federal laws and the powers they grant to presidents that can be used in a time of war and during national emergencies.

The exact statutory powers that President Trump plans to use aren’t yet known because the emergency text has not yet been made public.

That uncertainty worries Jon D. Michaels, professor at the UCLA School of Law, because he said the president has not shown the same level of responsibility, discretion and caution as previous presidents who have declared a national emergency ...

https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2019/02/15/state-of-emergency-worries-experts/

By Susan Milligan, Senior Writer
Feb. 15, 2019, at 5:00 p.m.

... Trump had for two years a generally friendly, GOP-run Congress, which approved his policy offerings and confirmed his nominees. While individual Republicans would privately express distaste or exasperation with Trump's rhetoric, they were eager to pass a tax cut and put conservative judges on the bench, and the president helped them do that.

Most of the pushback Trump got then came from the judicial branch, which delayed – then effectively forced the administration to re-do – its travel ban for certain foreign nationals. Many Trump deregulation efforts have also been interrupted by the courts.

But the president's declaration of a national emergency and intention to reallocate federal funds sets up a new turf war with Congress. And that includes some of the Republicans who have been such loyal allies on legislation.

Several GOP senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, have openly questioned or criticized what Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, called "an end run" around congressional authority ...

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-02-15/trumps-national-emergency-is-declaration-of-a-turf-war-with-congress

I have been waiting for someone, anyone, to use those two words :

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS.

Because make no mistake, that is exactly what this is.

We are hanging on by our fingernails here.

By Editorial Board
February 15 at 7:04 PM

IT IS hard to single out any single event in Donald Trump’s presidency as the most untethered from truth and reality. Still, Friday’s news conference, in which Mr. Trump tried to defend his end run around Congress based on a make-believe emergency at the southern border, was, to use the president’s own words, a “big con game.”

Mr. Trump’s technique is to spin fiction as fact, secure in the knowledge that minds will reel as fact-checkers labor to deconstruct his ziggurat of falsehoods. So let’s stick to one big, basic truth: There is no crisis at the southern border.

There is no crisis, and there is no justification to specifically and surgically contravene the will of Congress, which just weighed and dismissed Mr. Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall, opting instead to grant him $1.375 billion ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-be-fooled-by-trumps-make-believe-crisis/2019/02/15/b66adc60-3158-11e9-8ad3-9a5b113ecd3c_story.html?utm_term=.5ac313be7b02

By THE EDITORS
February 15, 2019 9:20 PM

... The laws that the president will use were clearly written with some dire national-security event in mind that would make it impossible for the president to go to Congress with the necessary dispatch. We believe there is a crisis at the border, but obviously nothing of this nature, as witnessed by the years-long attempt by the president to get Congress to fund his border wall, including the latest drawn-out political confrontation and negotiation. The president isn’t acting unilaterally because he can’t go to Congress, but because he has done so and he did not fully get what he wanted ...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/trump-national-emergency-declaration-bypasses-congressional-spending-power/

By Rachael Bade, Sean Sullivan and Josh Dawsey
February 15 at 11:36 PM

President Trump’s decision to unilaterally attempt to build his promised wall at the Mexico border is pulling his party into a tailspin of drama and unease — a move that could help his own 2020 reelection effort even at the expense of fellow Republicans, numerous GOP officials said on Friday.

Trump’s bid to circumvent Congress puts GOP lawmakers — including many vulnerable senators up for reelection in the next cycle — in the position of having to choose between their party’s leader and their self-described opposition to executive overreach.

If they back Trump’s emergency declaration, many lawmakers worry, they will be greenlighting a White House power grab that infringes on Congress’s constitutional power over spending. But if they oppose it, they risk attracting the wrath of Trump’s political base — and perhaps a primary challenge ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-recipe-for-disaster-trumps-border-emergency-drags-the-gop-into-a-risky-fight-ahead-of-2020/2019/02/15/f0afdfb6-3148-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.1fcbed001051

By DAVID FRENCH
February 15, 2019 6:29 PM

One thing that is abundantly clear from reading the full text of President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border — he’s barely even deigning to explain why there is a particular crisis today, or why that crisis is so grave that it requires the military to combat it. At its heart it’s a contemptuous document. It’s the proclamation of a monarch, not an argument by a president. And it should fail in court.

Before today, legal writers were guessing at the statutes the president would use to justify defying the will of Congress and using the military to build his border wall. Now we know. In his declaration, he’s exclusively using 10 U.S.C. 2808 to reallocate up to $3.6 billion from Department of Defense construction projects — more than double the amount that Congress allocated for wall construction in its border compromise. (He intends to use other funds as well for wall construction, but those aren’t applicable to the emergency declaration.)

This statute bears virtually no resemblance to the sweeping congressional grants of presidential discretion that allowed Trump to lawfully implement his travel ban or that allow presidents to declare national emergencies. Instead, it’s a much more carefully drafted law, with carefully defined terms. A court that does its job — applying the plain meaning of the words on the page — should have little patience for the Trump administration’s arguments ...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/trump-emergency-declaration-contemptuous-of-rule-of-law/

What if Trump is successful? Do we have a backdoor strategy in the case of the worst? Vigilance is wisdom.

in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value ...

Thomas Paine
The Crisis
December 23, 1776

That provides for a maximum amount of money to be spent on an emergency, and probably a restriction on the length of time an emergency can persist.

either the next democratic president will have unparalleled power to bypass Congress or we will have it set that a president is not king