Now It’s a Climate ‘Emergency’ Democrats are ready to use Trump’s precedent for their own purposes.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-its-a-climate-emergency-11563138092
When President Trump declared a national “emergency” in February to take money from the Pentagon to build his border wall, these columns warned he was setting a precedent that Democrats would exploit. Well, that day has arrived, as Democrats last week introduced a resolution in Congress declaring a national emergency due to climate change.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a joint resolution declaring that the climate Apocalypse is nigh, and demanding “a national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization of the resources and labor of the United States at a massive-scale.” Some commentators are calling the resolution “symbolic,” noting a contradictory provision that reads “nothing in this concurrent resolution constitutes a declaration of a national emergency for purposes of . . . any special or extraordinary power.”
Yet Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer, who also introduced it, made his inspiration clear. “The national emergency is not the border, it’s the climate,” Mr. Blumenauer said on a press call. A Sanders spokesperson also drew the comparison, noting that, in contrast to Mr. Trump’s “phony national emergencies,” the Sanders resolution addresses a genuine “existential” threat.
Nothing will happen this Congress, but the resolution’s real point is to put down a marker for the Democrat they expect will be President in 2021. If he or she declares an emergency as Mr. Trump did, it could be used to justify extralegal executive actions that Congress has refused to pass.
This isn’t far-fetched given how the Democratic presidential contenders are proposing to kill the Senate filibuster, pack the Supreme Court and replace the Electoral College. They’re frustrated with the Constitution’s checks and balances, and an “emergency” finding is one potential way around them.
The good news is the federal judiciary might check this trend. Mr. Trump was angry that Congress wouldn’t give him more than $1.38 billion in wall funding and used his emergency declaration to reallocate several billion more dollars for the wall. But this was a stretch of executive power that even a dozen Senate Republicans voted to overturn.
Federal Judge Haywood Gilliam has twice blocked the use of other funds to build the wall. In a May ruling he noted that Congress had repeatedly refused to appropriate more funds for the wall, and that the Legislature retains “‘absolute’ control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the executive branch.” He recognized the Administration’s “strong interest in border security” but, absent statutory authority to reprogram defense dollars, the executive’s argument boiled down to “the ends justify the means.”
The Trump Administration is appealing, and the legal merits are debatable given the ambiguity of “emergency” in the law. But conservatives who applaud Mr. Trump’s run around Congress should think again. Progressives will exploit the precedent for their own purposes.
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