Read: Border Community Where Trump Rallied for His Wall Sues President Over Emergency Declaration
Note: this release was originally published by Protect Democracy.
Stuart M. Gerson, Former Assistant Attorney General to President George H.W. Bush, Acting Attorney General of the United States, and co-counsel for Plaintiffs, said: “Any reasonable notion of the constitutionally fundamental separation of powers must be held to carry with it a necessary limitation on the power of the Executive. A state of emergency is something that should describe an objectively demonstrable exigency that time doesn’t allow for inter-branch resolution, not merely a bothersome situation that not only has persisted for years but is diminishing, and which actually has been the subject of congressional action. The current case is one in which the President is defying Congress, the type of case that Justice Jackson, concurring in the famous Youngstown steel seizure case, usefully put in the category of justiciable disputes in which the power of the Executive can and should be restrained. And, turning to the substance of what the President is attempting with respect to redirecting a significant portion of the defense budget, it would appear that doing so needlessly in the name of national defense ironically would, in fact, weaken the national defense.”