• Home
  • Opinion
  • Quizzes
  • Redistricting
  • Sections
  • About Us
  • Voting
  • Events
  • Civic Ed
  • Campaign Finance
  • Directory
  • Election Dissection
  • Fact Check
  • Glossary
  • Independent Voter News
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Congress>
  3. balance of power>

Landmark balance-of-power fight heading to court once Trump issues first veto

David Hawkings
March 05, 2019

The winter's biggest fresh test of a functional democracy, the balance-of-powers fight between the executive and legislative branches over the border wall, now seems certain to get settled by the judicial branch.

Bipartisan majorities are now locked down in the Senate as well as the House to oppose President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency. Now that four Republicans (Kentucky's Rand Paul most recently) have come out to join the Democrats against the president, as many as eight more may well conclude it's best for them to also jump on that oppositional bandwagon. These Republicans will be concluding it's politically safer (or better for their senatorial contentment in the long haul) to put their professed fealty to rule-of-law ahead of their usual tribal loyalties.


Even if all of them do so – and the timing of the vote is not yet set – that's still not nearly enough to overcome what looms as their first veto of the Trump presidency. There's nothing close to a two-thirds majority for an override in the House, either, even if the number of Republican iconoclasts (13 on the initial vote) doubles in the second round.

Therefore, despite suffering a rare congressional rebuke and the embarrassment of unusual defections from lawmakers in his own party, Trump is going to end up gutting out a huge victory for expansive presidential power – if only temporarily. The federal court system, and ultimately the sharply divided Supreme Court, will settle the matter once and for all.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

And the ruling will have much more lasting consequence than whether $4 billion in congressional appropriations decisions made last year get countermanded in order to finance approximately 55 miles of brocades along the Mexican border.

More importantly, the court will be asked to decide the limits of a president's power to set policies and spend money against the expressed will of Congress – including by declaring a national emergency that bipartisan majorities on Capitol Hill flatly declare does not exist. The justices will end up having to decide which power triumphs over the other, the legislative branch's power over the purse or the executive's powers to act in the name of protecting national security.

"The four current Democratic appointees historically have voted as a block consistently with the Democrats' political position on every controversial issue. I cannot think of anywhere they have broken ranks. They have used their brilliance to find arguments to support an ideological view. That means if just one of the Republican appointees on the court joins them, the president will lose the legal fight," Ron Sievert, a professor of national security and international law at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M university, wrote this week.

Chief Justice John Roberts has sided with the liberal bloc on several of the most prominent cases of the past decade, he wrote, while Justice Samuel Alito is not always reliably conservative and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh don't have a long enough paper trail on the court to make an easy prediction. "Thus, although a number of legal experts have written that they believe the president is on solid ground with his emergency order, I believe it could be a very hard case at the Supreme Court," Sievert concluded.

Related Articles Around the Web
  • Trump Issues First Veto After Congress Rejects Border Emergency ... ›
  • Trump vetoes bill that would block border wall national emergency ›
  • The House just passed a resolution blocking Trump's national ... ›
  • Donald Trump is going to have to veto a congressional effort to stop ... ›
balance of power

Want to write
for The Fulcrum?

If you have something to say about ways to protect or repair our American democracy, we want to hear from you.

Submit
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

Reform in 2023: Leadership worth celebrating

Layla Zaidane

Two technology balancing acts

Dave Anderson

Reform in 2023: It’s time for the civil rights community to embrace independent voters

Jeremy Gruber

Congress’ fix to presidential votes lights the way for broader election reform

Kevin Johnson

Democrats and Republicans want the status quo, but we need to move Forward

Christine Todd Whitman

Reform in 2023: Building a beacon of hope in Boston

Henry Santana
Jerren Chang
latest News

Here comes Mr. Jordan

Lawrence Goldstone
7h

It happened in 15 of 18 elections, rather than in 16. Should we expect it any less?

Rick LaRue
7h

Podcast: Pushing back against polarization

Our Staff
7h

What’s Your Take on securing top secret documents?

Debilyn Molineaux
17 January

3 shocking healthcare statistics for 2023

Robert Pearl
17 January

Evangelicals, it's time for dialogue work — the ‘Christian’ way

Dan Trippie
17 January
Videos

Video: Want to fight polarization? Take a vacation!

Our Staff

Video: Kevin McCarthy is Speaker, but he's got a tough job ahead

Our Staff

Video: #ListenFirst Friday End of Year

Our Staff

Video: Minnesota Gov. Walz asks fellow Democrats to ‘Think Big’ when it comes to fixing voting issues

Our Staff

Video: What’s up with Elon Musk?

Our Staff

Video: Happy Xmas

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Pushing back against polarization

Our Staff
7h

Podcast: Nationalism, race, and American party politics

Our Staff
17 January

Podcast: Turmoil among House Republicans: Is the political system to blame?

Our Staff
16 January

Podcast: Who stole the American dream?

Our Staff
11 January
Recommended
Here comes Mr. Jordan

Here comes Mr. Jordan

Congress
It happened in 15 of 18 elections, rather than in 16. Should we expect it any less?

It happened in 15 of 18 elections, rather than in 16. Should we expect it any less?

White House
Podcast: Pushing back against polarization

Podcast: Pushing back against polarization

Podcasts
What’s Your Take on securing top secret documents?

What’s Your Take on securing top secret documents?

3 shocking healthcare statistics for 2023

3 shocking healthcare statistics for 2023

Big Picture
Evangelicals, it's time for dialogue work — the ‘Christian’ way

Evangelicals, it's time for dialogue work — the ‘Christian’ way

Big Picture