2/16/19
WASHINGTON — Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, spent the last two weeks hammering out a deal on federal spending and border security with colleagues from both parties, reassured by a sense that Congress was finally asserting itself as a civil, stabilizing force. The feeling did not last. On Friday, President Trump mounted one of the most serious executive branch challenges to congressional authority in decades, circumventing Congress with an emergency declaration. It would allow him to unilaterally divert billions of dollars to a border wall and presented his Republican allies on Capitol Hill, who labored on a legislative compromise, with the excruciating choice of either defending their institution or bowing to his whims. The president’s move left Senate Republicans sharply divided, and it remains to be seen whether they will act collectively to try to stop Mr. Trump or how far into uncharted territory they are willing to follow a headstrong president operating with no road map beyond his own demands. The Republican resistance to Mr. Trump’s emergency declaration was much more pronounced in the Senate than in the House. After threatening to kill the spending compromise needed to keep the government open, Mr. Trump opted to cite a national emergency to pry loose additional funding to build a wall longer than the 55 miles in the bipartisan agreement. It was the divisive step that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, Ms. Capito and most other Republicans in the Senate had forcefully urged him not to take, because it would establish a precedent they feared future Democratic presidents would use against them.
The decision left Mr. McConnell, a professed guardian of the Senate’s prerogatives and power, joining with Mr. Trump in supporting an executive branch end run greater than any of the incursions into the legislative process he often accused President Obama of pursuing. Some top Republicans, led by Mr. McConnell, pivoted quickly to say they supported the president’s action because it was the only option left to him after Congress failed to meet his demands for wall funding. But Mr. McConnell is also warning Mr. Trump of the damage it could inflict on the party heading into the 2020 elections. Other Republicans portrayed it as a gross violation of the constitutional separation of powers, a blatant disregard by the president for Congress’s fundamental role in determining how federal dollars are spent. “He is usurping congressional authority,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a veteran member of the Appropriations Committee, said in an interview. “If the president can reallocate for his purposes billions of dollars in federal funding that Congress has approved for specific purposes and have been signed into law, that has the potential to render the appropriations process meaningless.” Ms. Capito said she would spend the holiday weekend weighing what to do next. She encouraged Mr. Trump to do the same. “He’s got to ask himself, ‘What are the ramifications of what I’m doing?’” she said. “If the resolution comes from the House to the Senate, where are those votes going to fall? What does that do to my momentum? He’s got to be considering that, I’m certain. Maybe he’s willing to take whatever could happen, maybe that’s not bothering him.”
