Fox News analyst Chris Stirewalt on Thursday said that Republican lawmakers are reluctant to allow President Donald Trump to declare a national emergency in order to build his border wall because future Democratic presidents could invoke the precedent to deal with the gun violence epidemic.
“Lots of things are national emergencies,” Stirewalt explained to Fox News host Sandra Smith. “Highway fatalities are national emergencies. If you define it that way, if you define it [as] what’s killing people, what are our problems, what are the things that are breaking the heart of this great nation, there are lots of things that are emergencies.”
“The Republicans will not let him declare a national emergency on this,” he continued, “and violate the Article I powers of Congress. They’re not going to let him do it because they know that if his successor, if President Kamala Harris says, ‘You know what, we have a national emergency on gun crime in the United States so I am going to start abridging the Second Amendment because I think that this is a national emergency because I have deemed it so.'”
“The reason the Republicans in Congress won’t let the president do that is because they know that one day there won’t be a Republican president,” Stirewalt concluded. “And when that happens, they don’t want that president to be able to willy-nilly declare a national emergencies and exert broad executive authorities.”
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