A legal debate is furiously raging over whether or not the president can declare a national emergency to fund a border wall.
I’m no legal expert, but fortunately, I don’t need to be to understand how senseless the argument against President Trump’s power to do this is. If what’s going on at the border is not a national emergency, then what exactly is?
History has actually given us an idea.
Thirty-one national emergencies have been declared since the National Emergencies Act of 1976 was passed. Several of them were far less serious than the crisis we’re seeing at the border today.
What did the Obama administration consider a national emergency? Illness. In 2009, President Obama declared a state of national emergency during the swine flu pandemic.
Well, there’s plenty of disease at the border right now too, but even leaving that aside, let’s compare: How many people died from swine flu before Obama declared the emergency? 1,000.
And, how many people died in 2017 alone from drugs, most of which are smuggled in by the Mexican drug cartels? 72,000.
I’m no mathematician either — and since at this point you might be asking what I am, I’m someone who hasn’t been duped by agenda-driven charlatans who‘ve managed to convince parts of America that down is up and left is right so that they can appear to righteously oppose Donald Trump and increase their popularity.
Anyone with half a brain can see that if 1,000 deaths from an uncontrollable disease is considered a national emergency, then tens of thousands of deaths from completely preventable causes ought to be considered one too.
Democrats previously — frequently — acknowledged the dangers of the drug trafficking problem coming from Latin America. They even supported the policies that would curb it. But even more than that, they used to admit that, yes, the drug problem is a national emergency.
Democratic President Bill Clinton declared a national emergency in 1995 to deal with Colombian drug trafficking, and Obama, in fact, renewed it, because as Obama explained, drug lords “continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and cause an extreme level of violence, corruption, and harm in the United States and abroad.”
Well, what happened? The problem is only getting worse. Drug overdose deaths from synthetic opioids increased 45 percent between 2016 and 2017. Drug traffickers are causing untold violence and corruption in American cities, using transnational gangs like MS-13 in those cities to carry out their crimes.
Conservative Review immigration expert and senior editor Daniel Horowitz explains how Mexican cartels are responsible for a torrent of drugs pouring into, for instance, the Chicago area.
He quotes a new Drug Enforcement Agency threat assessment: “Chicago is home to several street gangs that are heavily involved in drug distribution, and … these gangs are also responsible for a substantial portion of the city’s violent crime.”
This would be a crisis by itself, but top that with the fact that cities are also being rocked by human trafficking, and it’s happening in smaller rural areas as well.
That seems a lot worse than 1,000 people dying from the swine flu, even as bad as that is. Take 1,000 families hurting from the deaths of loved ones of swine flu. Now imagine all of the families hurting from the horrors inflicted by criminal illegal immigrants and the gangs and drugs they bring, and then imagine looking those families in the eye and telling them it’s not a crisis.
Or worse, filing your nails.
That’s what Ana Navarro did on cable TV, but it’s what all the Democrats who refuse to compromise are doing while federal workers don’t get paid and Americans suffer and die at the hands of criminal illegal immigrants.
This entire time, the Democrats have refused to compromise on border security. Speaker Pelosi said the most she’d agree to pay is $1.00 for a border wall. For such a rich lady, she’s as cheap as they come. But that’s not compromise.
Meanwhile, Republicans have given up more than $19 billion in compromise. Remember, they originally asked for $25 billion to fund the wall. The president has said he’s not ready to use his emergency powers now, but will “if they don’t come to their senses.”
For political reasons, the Democrats haven’t come to their senses yet. But if they don’t come to a solution by the end of this week, Trump should play his emergency powers card. At least it will get the ball rolling. Every day the Democrats refuse to compromise, their inaction turns this crisis into something far worse: a national emergency. And the president may have to treat it like one.