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[Pages H2105-H2106]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EMERGENCY DECLARATION
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from New
Jersey (Mr. Malinowski) for 5 minutes.
Mr. MALINOWSKI. Madam 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 15.
Few provisions of the Constitution are more plain than Article I,
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
or 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, then the President hasn't been acting like it. For 2 years,
when his party controlled the House and Senate, he never asked us for
money to build a wall, and if we truly faced that kind of imminent
threat, a wall would not even be an emergency measure given how long it
would take to build.
The critical point is this: When the President finally got around to
asking us 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;
it is whether this President or any President can use emergency powers
to defy the Congress when he disagrees with a
[[Page H2106]]
decision that 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 this would be wrong. The National 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 have heard some people say that President Obama did the same
thing. I am sorry, he did not. Both President Obama and President Bush
were sometimes accused of exceeding their constitutional authority; the
courts sometimes overruled them. But neither Obama nor Bush nor Nixon
nor Reagan nor Roosevelt nor Lincoln nor any President since the
founding of our Republic has ever decreed an emergency to spend money
that the Congress explicitly denied them.
If you want to find a precedent for what President Trump has done, I
can give you one. When I was a diplomat representing our country and
standing up for our values around the world, I had this exact same
debate with authoritarian governments in Ethiopia, in Bahrain, and in
Egypt, telling them: Do not use emergency powers to get around your
constitutions. I never thought I would have that kind of argument with
a President of the United States.
Many of my Republican colleagues have been saying that America must
not go the way of Venezuela, and they are right. When President Trump
said in his State of the Union that we must never become a socialist
country, I joined them in getting to my feet and applauding.
But how do you think Venezuela got to be a socialist country? I will
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 is 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 defend those boundaries when any one
of our party or any party tries to cross those boundaries. That is how
we have survived as a constitutional democracy. It is the only way we
can survive.
We are divided enough right now, so, please, let's not allow another
tear in the constitutional fabric that holds us together. Let's unite
as patriots on this one question so that we can safely disagree as
partisans on everything else.
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