Why Trumps National Emergency Is A Mistake

Now that Trump has issued a "NED" (National Emergency Directive) for a thing that's clearly not an emergency, we're officially in completely uncharted terrirtory.

Go check out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States

As you can see an overwhelming number of these are sanctions.

What Trump is doing is engineering an attempted end run around the legislative branch and I believe it will fail.

Why?

1. If he manages to scrape up the 5.X billion dollars, congress still has to sign off on it. It's not like he can simply demand 5.XB dollars and just get it.

2. This is a stunning and unheard of case of executive overreach. Moreover, it sets a very dangerous president. Why wouldn't a Democratic president just use the same tactics?

3. This money will need to come from somewhere. I'm sure the list of things to defund is already drawn up, and quite likely it falls squarely on party lines. In a nutshell you can expect states with Democrats senators are likely to get fucked extra hard as programs / institutions in their states get suddenly defunded. So as much as the idiots will be gleeful about the defunding of climate science, etc. They also know this cannon can just as easily be turned on them. Revenge is a dish served very cold.

4. This is going to trigger an unyielding and massive number of lawsuits. Trump will paint this as a stalling tactic from the Democrats, but I can imagine there's quite a few ranchers on the southern border who voted for Trump now going "Wait... you're going to take my land by emanate domain? Let me call my lawyers" and Indian Reservations and conservation land.

Granted at this point the SCOTUS is 5/9's filled with judges who have demonstrated they're Republican shills and when the facts don't work, simply throw out the facts and craft legal opinions that'll go down in history as galling hackery, but I'm not so sure about this. I'm suspecting they're going to be looking at #2 and #3 and asking the question "Do we want to open this pandora's box?"

At this point I've lost all hope they'll do the right thing, but who knows...

In any rate, I don't see the president getting his wall built. I see his lawyers frantically trying to defend a position that'll go something like this.

TL (Trump Lawyer): "This is clearly a national emergency"
OP (Opposing Lawyer): "So the last two years this wasn't? When you controlled both houses it wasn't?"
TL: "Umm... It's an EMERGENCY!!!"
OP: "By your own accounting the number of illegal immigrants is dropping"
TL: "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"

You get the drift...