A view of the U.S. Capitol over the reflecting pool: Glynn Wilson

By Glynn Wilson –

U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama is signaling that he will join other Democrats and a few Republicans to vote against President Donald J. Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to reroute Department of Defense money to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

By a vote of 245-182, the House passed a resolution on Tuesday to block the emergency declaration as an unconstitutional move to bypass the power of the purse granted to the House by the Constitution, in what some news organizations are calling “a stinging rebuke” to the president.

The vote sets up a similar vote in the Republican-controlled Senate, where prognosticators are calling the chances of passage “slim, but improving.”

Even before the vote in the House, Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, a member of the Senate’s Republican leadership who has signaled that he may vote for the resolution against the emergency declaration, said in an interview on MSNBC that the legislation “may actually pass the Senate.”

“The House just voted to block the declaration of national emergency. With this measure now moving to the Senate, I want to be clear,” Senator Jones said in a fund raising email for his 2020 campaign. “I am against this national emergency declaration, and I will vote to stop it. Running circles around our Constitution and the will of the people is no way to govern.”

While the vote was a victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the final tally was short of the votes needed to override a presidential veto, since only 13 Republicans voted to stop the emergency declaration. Whether the Senate can muster the two-thirds vote to override a veto is also considered unlikely.

“There is no emergency at the border,” Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, the main sponsor of the legislation, said during House floor debate. “Border crossings are at a four-decades low.”

Democrats and some Republicans are concerned that the emergency declaration would set a bad historical precedent. By unilaterally funding a border wall without approval of Congress, Trump’s move is considered a dangerous challenge to the constitutional balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch.

“There’s a time when you have to stand with the President regardless of party,” Senator Jones said. “But there’s always a time when you have to stand with the Constitution regardless of who the president or party leadership is. What’s wrong is wrong. And no leader of either party should let the President do this.”

Trump has claimed he has the power to proclaim a national emergency to direct existing money for a wall, since Congress refused to fully fund it, and he has indicated he would take money set aside for national disasters in California and Puerto Rico to build the wall he claimed during his presidential campaign in 2016 would be paid for by Mexico.

“The current situation at the southern border presents a humanitarian and security crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency,” the White House said in a statement.

But members of Congress and legal experts disagree.

“Now, I want to be clear on something,” Senator Jones said. “We do need to fix our broken immigration system and secure our borders. That starts with an honest dialogue among leaders of both parties. But that kind of problem solving in Congress is what our Constitution requires, and what I will continue to work for in the U.S. Senate.”

If the measure passes both houses and Trump vetoes it, it would be the first veto of his presidency and the first since Republicans lost majority control of the House in last November’s congressional elections. Overriding a veto would require two-thirds majorities in both chambers.

Last year Congress refused Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in wall funding, so the president refused to sign bipartisan compromise legislation and allowed the federal government to shutdown for 35 days, when Congress came back and passed a new funding resolution only giving him $1.37 billion for border barriers in fiscal year 2019.

Even if the declaration is not voted down or he vetoes legislation canceling the national emergency, it will face a legal challenge in the courts. A coalition of 16 states led by California and Maryland has already sued Trump and top members of his administration to block the emergency declaration as an unconstitutional abuse of executive power.

Michigan Congressman Justin Amash was the lone Republican co-sponsoring the resolution in the House.

“The same congressional Republicans who joined me in blasting Presisent Obama’s executive overreach now cry out for a king to usurp legislative powers,” Amash wrote on Twitter.

North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis published an op-ed in the Washington Post saying while he backed Trump on border security, but would vote for the resolution to block it because he “cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress.”

Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has said she would back the resolution to block Trump’s emergency declaration, along with Susan Collins of Maine, so it only needs one more Republican vote to pass the Senate — assuming all Democrats and two independents back it, according to the latest head count from Reuters.