Termination of National Emergency Declared By the President on February 2019--Veto Message From the President of the United States

Floor Speech

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Ms. PELOSI. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I thank him for his enthusiastic defense of the Constitution of the United States.

Madam Speaker, I rise to join my colleagues to uphold the Constitution and defend our democracy once again.

The House and the Senate came together, in great unity and bipartisanship, to pass Congressman Joaquin Castro's resolution to reject the President's lawless power grab, yet the President chose to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress, and the will of the American people with a veto.

At the birth of our democracy, amid revolution and war, Thomas Paine wrote that ``the times have found us.''

Once again, the times have found us to defend our democracy.

The times have found us to restore the Founders' vision of balance of power, checks and balances, coequal branches of government, and restore Congress' role as Article I, the first branch; Article I, the legislative branch.

The times have found us to honor our oath to support and defend the Constitution and protect the American people.

We all know that the heart of our Constitution, the beauty of it all, is that we have a system of checks and balances.

Our Founders did not want a monarchy. That is what they had rejected. They wanted a democracy: coequal branches of government to act as a check on each other.

This Congress of the United States acted to honor the Constitution and our responsibility to protect and defend by passing legislation in our appropriations bill, showing how, in a bipartisan way, Congress would protect our borders.

We understand our responsibility to do that. We don't take that responsibility lightly. We take it seriously.

Even when the President disagreed with us, he should have accepted the bipartisan, bicameral decision to proceed. He had taken pride in a shutdown of Government for about 1 month because he didn't get his way on the border.

After 1 month, bipartisan, bicameral action by the Congress sent him a bill almost exactly like what he rejected in the first place, and he decided to reject Congress' wisdom and Congress' acting within its authority to protect our borders in a serious, effective, values-based way.

We don't take this vote here today lightly. Even when the legislative branch disagrees with the executive, we respect the office the President holds and his right to veto legislation.

But when those decisions violate the Constitution, then that must be stopped. Many of our colleagues from across the aisle joined last month to defend our democracy by passing Congressman Castro's privileged resolution.

That happened in the House. That happened in the United States Senate.

We call on all of our colleagues to simply show that same measure of respect for our Constitution today.

We take an oath to the Constitution, not to the President of the United States. We take an oath that we must honor.

The choice is simple, between partisanship and patriotism, between honoring our sacred oath or hypocritically, inconsistently, breaking that oath.

Madam Speaker, I urge a strong, bipartisan ``yes'' to override this veto.

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