Ted Cruz could be the deciding vote in stopping Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration

  Yesterday the House passed a bill which would prevent Donald Trump from re-appropriating monies from the Defense Department and other agencies in order to build a wall on the Mexican border, but its fate is a little less certain in the Senate.

  I say a little less certain because it only takes four Republican votes to pass the legislation and right now there are three Republicans who are poised to vote yea. Those three are Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski. That means the Democrats only need one more Republican to vote in favor of the bill in order to stop Donald Trump and, ironically enough it could be a Senator from Texas who casts the deciding vote.

  According to this story Ted Cruz has some serious concerns with Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency on the border and he is still undecided about this piece of legislation. Here is more:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the Senate’s most knowledgeable experts on constitutional law, remains skeptical of the merits of President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to build a border wall, he told the Star-Telegram Tuesday.

“I am still assessing the legal authority of the arguments that the administration is putting forward,” Cruz said after a meeting with White House lawyers off the Senate chamber earlier that day.

“I emphatically agree that we have a crisis at the border and that we need to solve it, and I am grateful that the president and the administration are leading to secure the border and to build a wall,” said Cruz, who is among the Senate’s toughest border security voices.

“At the same time I’ve long said that any president, Republican or Democrat, must follow the constitution and must follow the laws,” added Cruz, a constitutional lawyer who made his career suing the federal government for overreach as Texas’ solicitor general.

“So I’m taking the time to consider and analyze the specific statutory authorities the administration is relying upon and their arguments as to why they might apply,” Cruz said.

  I have to admit I share the same concerns as Ted Cruz, I did not like it when Barack Obama used executive action to work his way around the Congress and I do not like it now either. 

  It is going to be very interesting to see which way Ted Cruz ends up going on this, although in the end I believe he will most likely vote against it. But of course in the end even if it does pass it is highly unlikely there will be enough votes to overturn a Presidential veto.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium