We begin today’s roundup with a scathing editorial from USA Today on the Republicans who supported President Trump’s emergency declaration:
Hypocrisy is a term often bandied about too easily. But it was crystallized in a single moment Thursday, when 41 Republican senators voted to surrender their legislative authority to an overreaching president.
The issue was the power of the purse as spelled out in Article I of the Constitution, which decrees that the people's representatives, not the president, decide how tax dollars are spent.
But in Thursday's vote, the feckless 41 supported President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration aimed at redirecting billions of tax dollars to fund his border wall. Congress had specifically refused to provide this money, so Trump simply took it upon himself to fund it without Congress.
Seung Min Kim & Josh Dawsey at The Washington Post add:
President Trump tried to marshal his most potent weapon — himself — to stave off what eventually became an embarrassing rejection from his own party over his declared national emergency on the border.
In numerous calls with Republican senators in recent days, the president spoke of the battle almost exclusively in personal terms — telling them they would be voting against him while brushing aside constitutional concerns over his attempt to reroute billions of federal dollars for a border wall. He argued that a vote against the emergency would be seen by GOP supporters as being against border security and the wall and would hurt their own political fortunes, according to a person with direct knowledge of some of the calls. [...]
But it wasn’t enough, as a dozen Republicans joined Democrats in dealing Trump a humiliating blow by voting Thursday to nullify the national emergency, setting up what is likely to be the first veto of his presidency.