Border Security

Yes, the White House has better legal arguments than many of Trump’s most vociferous opponents claim. Since the National Emergencies Act of 1976 was signed by Gerald Ford, there have been 58 national emergencies declared under the law, and 31 of them are still in effect.

As Trump noted in his Rose Garden announcement, “there’s rarely been a problem” with past emergency declarations. “They sign it; nobody cares. I guess they weren’t very exciting. But nobody cares. They sign it for far less important things in some cases — in many cases.”

But that’s the point. Most emergency declarations haven’t been very exciting, precisely because they were uncontroversial, dealing mostly with such things as narrow sanctions on international crime.

Under a different emergency power, President Obama declared a national emergency in 2009 to combat the swine flu. The logic was that Obama needed flexibility to act quickly, without waiting for Congress, and was based on the assumption that if Congress were capable of acting quickly, it would have approved the measure.

That’s not the situation here. Congress did act. In a bipartisan vote, it expressed its will on what should — and should not — be done at the border.

All the emergency-power laws that Congress has passed over the decades give the executive branch powers it should not have. But with a few exceptions, they’ve been more annoying than dangerous. Not so here.

Trump has decided that not getting a political win from Congress justifies the use of monarchical powers to deploy the military on U.S. soil. It is, flatly, an abuse of power.

The fact that so many Republican members of Congress are fine with it is further evidence that both Congress and the Republican party have become a nest of capons — and even weaker than that strutting rooster in the Rose Garden.