Q
can you please tell us real purpose of shutdown?
How Trump could use a national emergency to get his border wall, explained
Many presidents have declared national emergencies, including George W. Bush after 9/11 and Barack Obama during the swine flu outbreak.
In recent history, they’ve done so under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which lets presidents issue an emergency declaration but under certain constraints — namely, Trump can only use specific powers Congress has already codified by law, and he has to say which powers he’s using. The 1976 law was actually passed to rein in presidential power and codify how presidents were going about declaring emergencies, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. It offers no definition for what counts as an emergency.
If Trump were to try to get border wall funding through the National Emergencies Act, the question then becomes which already-existing laws he could use to get the money. That’s where he — and the legal scholars trying to figure out what he’s talking about — run into trouble: identifying the laws and statutes he could actually use. The Brennan Center for Justice tracks about 130 laws that contain special powers Trump could access.
“It could be that by putting together a lot of different sources of emergency authority, the president could tap a lot of different funds and at least start,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, told me.
She pointed to a handful of preexisting laws the president could potentially use.
He could, for example, reallocate military spending on construction projects for the wall. One law allows the defense secretary, after a national emergency declaration, to direct the army’s civil works program to construct a structure needed for national defense and use the military budget to do it. Another lets the secretary direct other military services for construction projects. For example, money could come out of the budget for building housing on military bases for service members and into the budget for the wall.
Or, Trump could declare a “state of immigration emergency,” which unlocks an immigration emergency fund. It’s generally supposed to be used to help states feed and house migrants and process their claims, but Scheppele said that it is “vaguely worded enough to permit an edgy interpretation” that could get the funds for the wall. The issue there is that the fund only has about $20 million at the moment, not enough for Trump’s wall.
But if his legal team could identify enough emergency declaration laws to cobble together, they could start to gather the funds.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18172749/trump-national-emergency-government-shutdown-wall