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Originally Posted by Rococo
I take Trump pretty seriously when he says he may declare a state of emergency. He is not a habitual bluffer. And when a court declares that there is no emergency, he can end the shutdown on the grounds that the judiciary won't let him build the wall. That would be pure misdirection because he could continue the shutdown even in the absence of a national emergency, but it's exactly the sort of misdirection he loves.
Then he can bang the drum about how he needs to be reelected in 2020 to continue the Herculean task of cleaning the Aegean stables, i.e., the federal judiciary, of liberal pussies. (He won't actually refer to the Aegean stables, because that would require knowledge of what the Aegean stables are, but he might well portray himself as a modern-day Hercules.)
Nearly every law student in the country studies the "Steel Seizures" case, which arose under Eisenhower and limits presidential power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngs...jority_opinion
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The decision nonetheless has had a broad impact. It represented a check on the most extreme claims of executive power at the time. It also represented the Court's assertion of its own role in intervening in political questions, as the Court later did in Baker v. Carr and Powell v. McCormack. The Court also applied the Frankfurter-Jackson approach to analyzing Congress' legislative authorization of Presidential action in invalidating efforts by the Nixon administration to plant wiretaps without prior judicial approval, while citing it more generally in support of its decision to permit litigation against the President to proceed in Clinton v. Jones. The high court also relied on Youngstown in Medellín v. Texas, 06-984 (2008). In that case, President Bush had pressured the state of Texas to review the murder conviction of a Mexican citizen who had tortured and raped two teenage girls in 1993, arguing that a 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) required law enforcement authorities to tell the accused of his right under the Vienna Convention to notify Mexican diplomats of his detention. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Court held that ICJ rulings were not enforceable in the United States, and Bush's actions were unconstitutional. Quoting Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded, "The president's authority to act, as with the exercise of any governmental power, 'must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.'"[8]
Trump isn't actually planning on calling an "emergency" though, he's planning on using a statutory provision related to the ability of the DOD to transfer funds for building (on foreign soil) given exigent need. Trump also cannot do this, but for different reasons (Congress controls the purse, not foreign, no rational basis). Fox and other GOP talking heads will mostly (intentionally) miss this point. Trump and people in the WH will miss this point because they do not understand it.