Bad Bob Loc: Virginia

https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-napolitano-trumps-brazen-unconstitutional-184312098.html

Judge Napolitano's Chambers: Judge Andrew Napolitano explains how President Trump's declaration of a national emergency to bypass Congress to get money for the border wall is unconstitutional.

video

Carol Kelly

If Napolitano is the best you can quote, poor you. He bends in the wind.

CLKJR

While I like Judge Napolitano He is NOT infallible, He expresses his OPINION, that doe not make it a FACT. He has had to make corrections in errors of opinion before.

Wolf counselor Loc: Heart of Texas

Sorry Boob but....................

padremike Loc: Phenix City, Al

One might consider why Napolitano was never picked for higher offices than a New Jersey Superior Court Judge. Maybe it's because he's a vegetarian?

RoyinNC

I used to have a lot of respect for his opinions, which seemed very principled. He isn't anymore!

RT friend Loc: Kangaroo valley NSW Australia

Trump snapped.

Liberty Tree

He is swinging more left or just dislikes Trump.

ACP45 Loc: Rhode Island

I like and respect Andrew Napolitano.

I also like and respect Jonathan Turley.

For those who are not familiar with who Jonathan Turley is: Jonathan Turley (born May 6, 1961) is an American lawyer, legal scholar, writer, commentator, and legal analyst in broadcast and print journalism. He is a professor at the George Washington University Law School. Turley holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School where he teaches torts, criminal procedure, and constitutional law.

He was interviewed by National Public Radio (NPR) on the legality of Trump's declaration of a national emergency in order to secure wall funding. Here is the link: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/17/695536809/law-professor-jonathan-turley-on-the-legal-fight-over-the-border-wall

.....and here is the transcript:

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

For more on the legal challenges to President Trump's emergency declaration, we're joined now by Jonathan Turley. He's a law professor at George Washington University. Good morning.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Good morning, Lulu.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Just an FYI, I have a bit of a cold.

We just heard about one lawsuit being brought against the president by landowners and other stakeholders along the southern border. Do they have a case?

TURLEY: Well, they have a case, but I'm afraid I don't believe they have a particularly strong case.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why?

TURLEY: The reason is that the Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976, and they gave a president virtually unfettered authority. In fact, it really doesn't even define what an emergency is.

So there's two ways to challenge this. One is the source of the authority, which is that act. That really - I don't think that dog will hunt, even though members of Congress are talking about that as the challenge. And the second one is the source of the funds.

Now, that one may have more of a real possibility in terms of a challenge. But even that is going to be a rather, you know, long row to hoe because they gave the president over a billion dollars, and he's now identified at least three sources of largely undedicated funds that he can use. Even if you knock out half of those, he's still over $5 billion.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well the ACLU, El Paso County, the government of California have also filed or say they're going to file lawsuits. And again, I want to ask you about one particular thing because people are noting the president's Rose Garden press conference where he said this.

(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this. But I'd rather do it much faster.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I didn't need to do this. This isn't the first time the president's words have been used against him in court challenging.

TURLEY: (Laughter) No, it's not. And he really has a remarkable record in undermining his own administration. And courts have actually used his statements on Twitter and other - in other forums against him. But that's unlikely to be enough because this is a problem, in some ways, of Congress' making.

For years, many of us have begged Congress to stop giving presidents unfettered authority, stop appropriating billions of dollars with few conditions. And they have refused to do that. And this is sort of the chickens coming home to roost. They gave him a stature with unfettered authority and gave him billions with limited conditions, and he'll use both of those.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: It seems that this is something that we're coming up against a lot in the Trump presidency, where the limits of the presidential authority are being tested all the time, and they're being tested in the courts. I guess the big question is, how friendly will the courts be to these cases because presidential authority is an open question?

TURLEY: It is. And I hate to be a doomsayer, but I think many courts would view this with a great deal of skepticism.

You know, Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, if my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them; it's my job. And what he was saying is, I'm not here, really, to say what's a good policy or bad policy, what's good legislation or bad legislation. I'm here to say what legislation says. And that's what Congress says is that it's a national emergency because the president says it's a national emergency.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And he gets to define that.

TURLEY: That's right. And when they go to court, the judge is going to say, wait, hold it. You guys reserve the right to reverse this. You can actually rescind an emergency. And instead of doing that, you're coming to me and asking me to do it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you're saying you can rescind an emergency, Congress can actually do that.

TURLEY: That's right, by majority vote of each house. And frankly, I think they should. Now, it does get tougher because that is like a form of legislation. It's a resolution. But the president can veto it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Veto it.

TURLEY: So you do need a supermajority. And the odds are they probably don't have the votes for that.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So in the few seconds we have left, what do you predict?

TURLEY: I think that he's going to prevail. And if they challenge him on his right to declare an emergency, I think that will be a spectacular failure. They'll have to focus on the source of the funds. But I don't think that's going to get them all the way they need to go to stop this construction.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University. Thank you very much.

TURLEY: Thank you.

I think on this issue, I'll side with the constitutional scholar!!!!

Larry the Legend Loc: Not hiding in Milton

Unlike many others, Judge Napolitano is a well respected jurist known as a strict constitutionalist. He doesn't let his politics get in the way of his judgement and I place great weight to his opinions simply because of those things. Every time there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, his name comes up in the discussion and it has always been my contention that he will not be nominated because he respects the law and will not bend for political considerations like the others, hence the politicians who nominate and approve SCOTUS justices will pass over him every time in favor of someone they can 'depend on' to bend the law to suit their designs.

If Judge Napolitano describes a political action as a 'brazen unconstitutional overreach', I will accept his words with deference and respect for his expansive knowledge. That would not stop me from pointing out that the money he is spending has already been appropriated by Congress and is available for his use by default, because it was either earmarked as emergency funds or was appropriated but not earmarked for any specific project or purpose; a general fund.

You may dismiss that assertion as a political sleight of hand, but that does not detract from the fact that it is legally sound reasoning and that is why the President's actions will be declared constitutional by the Supreme Court once it gets that far. Of course the California Democrats on the ninth circuit will rule in favor of the democrats suing the President, and so will the California Democrats on the court of appeals, but the SCOTUS only has four politicians and five actual justices, and the President will be vindicated (5-4) by their deliberations.

Judge Napolitano is probably right, it probably is brazen, but the question of constitutionality will be settled by those who have the responsibility of making such decisions, and not the Fox News Legal analyst, however respectable and impartial he may be.

Bad Bob Loc: Virginia

snowbear37 Loc: MA.

Congress may be able to prevent Trump from getting SOME of the funding he wants, but not all of it. The President declaring a national emergency IS constitutional and he won't be the first President to do so and he won't be the last. Pelosi and the Dems are already salivating for a new Democrat President so they can invoke a national emergency to address gun control (too bad they didn't think of it sooner...Trump had to show them how it's done). Not that it would work, because it won't. The pesky 2nd Amendment is in the way.

lindajoy Loc: right here with you....

Congress can do no such thing since it was they who gave unlimited power to the President and the Supreme court ruling in the Chadha decision, however, the Supreme Court declared all legislative vetoes unconstitutional. The court concluded Congress could not act through concurrent resolution, but only by enacting a new law, through the process of bicameralism and presentment to the president, which provides the president
With veto power he can most assuredly use and will if needed...

For this very reason Pelosi grandstanding over challenging Trump is dead in the water, much like her career in politics...

And the money needed, since Congress can not deny the needs of the President funds must also be allocated...

But the key to the NEA was Congress’s determination to maintain a check on the power it was delegating to the president.

That check came in the form of the power Congress retained, through a concurrent resolution of the House and the Senate, to terminate any presidential declaration of emergency. A concurrent resolution is not a statute: the president plays no role in such a resolution. If Congress had to enact a new law to override the president’s declaration of emergency, the president would inevitably veto it. In essence, Congress said to the president: “We accept the need to give you power to declare emergencies, but we reserve the right to decide whether we agree with that declaration in any specific circumstance.” This concurrent resolution, known as a legislative veto, was a means through which Congress and the president shared the power to define emergencies.

Through this legislative veto, Congress—not the courts, was designed to be the institutional forum to determine whether the president was right in declaring an emergency. If both houses of Congress disagreed with the president, that was the end of the matter: The declaration was terminated. Courts would play no role. Congress could also be comfortable granting the president broad initial power to declare an emergency, given the power it retained to reject that determination. Attempting to define “emergencies” in advance was also not as pressing a concern, because Congress could decide, after a presidential declaration of emergency, whether it agreed.

Moreover, good policy reasons exist for not trying to write into legislation in advance a highly specific definition of what constitutes an emergency, almost by definition, the very nature of an emergency makes defining it in advance not only difficult but perhaps unwise. Any statutory definition would risk failing to anticipate new kinds of emergencies that might arise. But again, that was less of a problem when the House and the Senate could jointly oversee, and potentially reject, a presidential declaration of emergency.

In the Chadha decision, however, the Supreme Court declared all legislative vetoes unconstitutional. The court concluded Congress could not act through concurrent resolution, but only by enacting a new law, through the process of bicameralism and presentment to the president—which provides the president with an opportunity to veto (as President Trump surely will do if the House and the Senate vote to reject his emergency declaration). While Chadha arose under another statute, the decision destroyed the carefully wrought scheme Congress had created in the NEA for sharing power over determining when emergencies existed. But Chadha’s effects went beyond just the NEA, because the decision invalidated the legislative vetoes in all of the nearly 200 federal statutes that contained them. Perhaps no Supreme Court decision has struck down as many acts of Congress in one fell swoop.

I do believe Congress trying to eliminate the SC kinda ticked them off big time when drawing up their unconstitutional providionsvto retain pieer for themselves... Hugeee mistake on their part !!!
Chadha, though not as well-known as some other separation-of-powers decisions, might also be the most consequential decision the Supreme Court has ever issued in this area, in terms of the real-world balance of power between Congress and the president. Consider how different the current border-wall emergency confrontation would be if Congress could override the president’s declaration through concurrent action of the House and the Senate. Instead, Congress will be reduced to a largely symbolic role, because after Chadha¸ the president has the power to veto any action of Congress.

With Congress now powerless as a forum for effective action on such an issue, it is no surprise that those who disagree with the president will rush to the courts. Courts are traditionally reluctant to second-guess presidential judgments in areas such as foreign affairs, national security and emergencies, and Chadha was not designed to aggrandize judicial power. But ironically, Chadha’s inevitable effect is to thrust courts into the leading role in determining whether the president has properly declared an emergency. That is true not just under the NEA but also under many of the nearly 200 federal statutes whose legislative veto mechanisms Chadha invalidated. When courts struggle over their role in evaluating whether the president has legitimately declared a national emergency, it is worth recognizing that it is the Supreme Court’s decision in Chadha that has pushed the courts onto center stage....
You may wish to read this~~

https://www.lawfareblog.com/supreme-courts-contribution-confrontation-over-emergency-powers

kemmer

Trump supporters are falling away like the leaves in autumn.

lindajoy Loc: right here with you....

I know, did you see how bad his rallies were for the 2018 elections, dropping like flies~~~