Waching daily Feb 17 2019

Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer are coming out swinging against President

Trump's emergency declaration he made on Friday.

Fox News reported that on Thursday, Pelosi theorized that if President Trump can declare

a national emergency in order to bypass Congress to fund a border wall, there's no reason

that a Democratic president in the future can't employ the same measure to deal with

gun violence in the country.

Pelosi made the remarks during a press conference in the Capitol Thursday – the anniversary

of the Parkland massacre in Florida that left 17 people dead.

The top Democrats on Capitol Hill wasted little time Friday bashing President Trump's decision

to declare a national emergency at the southern border, portraying the move as "unlawful"

and vowing to take quick action to block it.

Asserting that there is no security crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, Speaker Nancy Pelosi

(D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned that Trump's maneuver

tramples the Constitution's clear-cut separation of powers while threatening to drain funds

from programs more vital to public safety and national security.

"The President's unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist does great

violence to our Constitution and makes America less safe, stealing from urgently needed defense

funds for the security of our military and our nation," Pelosi and Schumer said in

a statement.

"This is plainly a power grab by a disappointed President, who has gone outside the bounds

of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative

process."

Moments earlier, speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Trump had declared a national

emergency at the border in order to sidestep Congress and liberate funds from other programs

to launch new construction of the long-promised wall that was central to his 2016 campaign.

"It's a great thing to do because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion

of people," Trump said.

The move was highly expected.

Just a day earlier, the president had announced that he would reluctantly sign an enormous

spending bill to avert a second government shutdown — a package that excluded the billions

of dollars he had requested for the wall — but would compensate the difference by declaring

a national emergency, thereby charging ahead with the wall construction without explicit

approval from Congress.

The strategy has been widely panned by lawmakers of both parties, as even many of Trump's

Republican supporters have framed the move as an act of executive overreach — a common

GOP criticism of the Obama administration.

Yet Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), wary of Republicans suffering the

political fallout of another shutdown, vowed to support the emergency declaration in order

to get Trump's signature on the spending package.

The Democratic leaders minced no words in proclaiming the pronouncement unconstitutional.

They're eyeing resolutions to block the declaration legislatively, as well as possible

legal challenges that could tie Trump's hands for months.

"The President's actions clearly violate the Congress's exclusive power of the purse,

which our Founders enshrined in the Constitution," Pelosi and Schumer said.

"The Congress will defend our constitutional authorities in the Congress, in the Courts,

and in the public, using every remedy available."