The Senate today easily voted to overturn President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southwestern border, delivering a bipartisan rebuke to what lawmakers in both parties deemed executive overreach by a president determined to build his border wall over Congress’s objections.
The 59-41 vote on the House-passed measure sets up the first veto of Trump’s presidency.
It was not overwhelming enough to override Trump’s promised veto, but Congress has now voted to block a presidential emergency declaration for the first time — and on one of the core promises that animated Trump’s political rise, the vow to build a wall between the United States and Mexico.
“Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway,” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said. “The problem with this is that after a Revolutionary War against a king, our nation’s founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power. This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom.”
In an attempt to limit defections ahead of the vote, Trump had sought to frame the vote publicly as not only a declaration of support for his border security policies but a sign of personal loyalty.
“It’s pure and simple: it’s a vote for border security, it’s a vote for no crime,” Mr. Trump told reporters ahead of the vote, which he declared on Twitter to be “a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime and the Open Border Democrats!”
But he could not overcome concerns among Republican senators about the legality of redirecting $3.6 billion from military construction projects toward the border wall even after Congress explicitly rejected the funding request.
The 12 Republicans who voted against Trump’s national emergency:
- Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)
- Roy Blunt (Mo.)
- Susan Collins (Me.)
- Mike Lee (Utah)
- Jerry Moran (Kan.)
- Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
- Rand Paul (Ky.)
- Rob Portman (Ohio)
- Mitt Romney (Utah)
- Marco Rubio (Fla.)
- Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.)
- Roger Wicker (Miss.)
Trump tweeted this reaction:
VETO!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2019
The vote marks an explicit rebuke of Trump’s effort to sidestep the constitutional power of the purse given to Congress, and although supporters will not be able to overcome a veto, the action could bolster a number of lawsuits contesting the emergency declaration as a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
The number of Republican defections underscores the turmoil within the Republican Conference, where senators were torn between supporting the president’s vision for border security and asserting Congress’s constitutional prerogative to dictate federal spending.
Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina and one of the first to publicly say he would support the resolution, announced he had changed his mind just minutes before the vote.
Facing a tough re-election campaign in 2020, he said that conversations with the White House and his colleagues contributed to his changed vote.
He had also been warned in recent days by North Carolina conservatives that he could face a primary challenger for his stand.