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Pat Buchanan: Trump’s National-Emergency Power Grab Is the Latest in a Long Line By U.S. Presidents
February 19, 2019
Autocrats are replacing democrats worldwide because people are concluding that the centrist parties they turned to for years aren’t delivering on basic services like protecting national borders, columnist Patrick Buchanan writes.
President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on Friday, February 15 to take money appropriated for the U.S. military to extend the wall along America’s southern border with Mexico may be pushing the bounds of the U.S. Constitution, Buchanan writes, but presidents have been doing that since at least Thomas Jefferson and later been praised for it.
He argues that Congress is to blame for its own loss of power: When presidents act, Congress tends to shrink; when the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress does nothing, even though Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority to curtail what the court can and can’t do.
Article III, Section II states:
“In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
But Congress rarely invokes this portion of the federal constitution, which it could use to put limits on the federal Supreme Court.
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