Termination of National Emergency Declared By the President on February 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio).

Mr. Speaker, to my good friends on the Republican side of the aisle, this is really about the Constitution.

Madison, in the Federalist Papers, wrote that the appropriations power--that is, the power of the purse--is the ultimate power that Congress has to rein in excesses by the President or even by the court. That is where we are today.

It is not that there is an emergency. We can all agree there is a problem. Call it an emergency at the border. There are many others-- fires, floods, Houston, you name it. There are plenty of emergencies.

It is not that the President shouldn't have the authority and power to declare an emergency and then deal with it. That is not the issue here. The issue here is that this particular emergency declaration by the President was specifically used to circumscribe and usurp the authority of Congress in our power of the purse.

Keep in mind, government was shut down for 35 days because the President wanted money for his wall. We debated it. At the end of that, we appropriated $1.3 billion or so for border security, including some fences and walls.

The President signed that bill and then immediately turned around and declared an emergency shortly thereafter, used that emergency power to rip off $3.6 billion from necessary military construction projects around the world, of which $770 million of that--three-quarters of a billion--was specifically designed to push Russia back, part of the European Reassurance Initiative projects in Eastern Europe and Europe to specifically push Putin away from NATO.

Other projects have been described here, all of them deemed to be essentially important for the security of this Nation.

That is not all. There was another almost $3 billion that came out of the operations of the military. Nearly $6 billion was ripped out of our military, all of it necessary for the security of this Nation, and repurposed for the border wall.

The fundamental issue here is not about an emergency. It is not about the emergency powers of the President. Although, we certainly ought to circumscribe those. This is very, very much about the way in which the current emergency power is being used.

First, to circumvent the appropriate constitutional and necessary power of the Congress to do appropriations, that power should not ever reside with the President, but that is exactly what he has used this emergency appropriation to accomplish, to grab the power of the purse, to take that power, that essential power, as Madison said, from the Congress, and then specifically, and most dramatically and dangerously, harm the security of this Nation by stopping necessary construction projects that the military says we need to protect NATO against Putin and Russia.

We ought to pass this simply to regather the power that we must have to be a coequal branch of government, the power of the purse.

We can debate emergencies. We can appropriate money for the border, and we do. But to allow the President to use this power to usurp the fundamental constitutional authority of Congress is wrong. Therefore, we must--we must. We have no choice. If we believe in the work and our oath, we have no choice but to pass this resolution.

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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Meadows), my good friend, is a true conservative. I know him. I know him well. We have had many, many discussions. The gentleman is a true conservative, and he really does believe in the Constitution.

The gentleman made a most interesting argument that, in the legislation that ended the 35-day Trump shutdown, we should have put into that legislation prohibitions on this. Yes, indeed, we should have, had we any idea whatsoever that the President would so abuse the emergency authority as to literally rip away from Congress our appropriations powers.

Keep in mind that we specifically put legislation and money forward for the border wall that solved the 35-day shutdown. The President signed that bill and then used the emergency power that is the subject of this debate and this resolution to usurp our appropriations power.

He did that by going into the military and taking nearly $6 billion. And I understand he is looking for another $10 billion or so from the same source, using the same power.

This is a direct attack on our appropriations power.

Now, we have an emergency. You want to talk about an emergency? We are willing to work on emergencies and appropriate the necessary money. We have done so many times. In fact, there once was an offer for some $20-plus billion for all of this.

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