‘Never Trumpers’ are suddenly constitutionalists

OPINION:

Now come all the great Washington “conservatives” lambasting President Trump for threatening to declare a “national emergency” so he can finally build the promised southern border wall that got him elected president.

These out-of-the-blue “constitutionalists” have lined up alongside the open border Democrats who for years have airily dismissed U.S. citizens’ alarm over the open border as a “manufactured crisis.”

These critics are all of a sudden worried that Mr. Trump will overreach his executive authority. Even more fundamentally, they cringe, this action by a president will forever grant unchecked new powers to every future president.

Give me a break. These are the same goons in Congress who for decades have handed over congressional authority to any president in the White House who happens to wear the same color jersey they do. Democrats have done it for Democrat presidents and Republicans have done it for Republican presidents.

Why did Congress invent the National Emergencies Act in the first place if it is such a threat to the Constitution? And where has all this angst been the five dozen times presidents have declared national emergencies since the law was created in 1976?

Now come these Republican “conservatives” — many of whom also happen to be Never Trumpers — all horrified that Mr. Trump might declare the invasion on the southern border a national emergency.

This, they bleat, will only give a green light to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to declare a national emergency and ban all air travel when she becomes president.

First, as much as I personally adore AOC and want her to headline every Democratic debate for the rest of history, she will not be president.

Her enthusiasm is infectious. But, sadly, she is the poster child of higher education in America today. She is full of passion, feelings and self-righteousness, yet utterly devoid of information, knowledge, wisdom, experience or the slightest accomplishment.

Second, a left-wing nut in a position of power doesn’t need a “green light” to violate the Constitution or blow through long-settled rules of discourse, decorum or constitutionalism. (See: Obama, Barack; Holder, Eric; Reid, Harry.)

Third, I guess it is true that a future President Kamala D. Harris could try using a national emergency to round up everybody’s guns. The only problem with such a move would be that it is — completely unconstitutional. Don’t you love how all these “constitutional conservatives” are so smart about the Constitution, yet cannot comprehend the simple words of the Second Amendment?

Last I checked, the Constitution did not, however, guarantee a right for any alien anywhere in the world to invade our southern border.

The truth is all these Never Trumpers have always been against this president and especially his agenda to secure the southern border.

For more than three decades now, Congress has refused to fix the mess. They have allowed the problem to fester into the full-blown humanitarian crisis that it is today.

Manufactured? Yeah, manufactured by Congress. Manufactured as in made up?

In what world is 11 million illegal aliens inside a country NOT an invasion? We invaded Normandy with about 156,000 on D-Day. About a million after a month.

Eleven million? And that is the conservative estimate.

And in what world is an invasion of more than 10 million people not an emergency?

The fact that the invasion of our southern border has taken place over a period of decades only highlights the chronic nature of the emergency situation.

Meanwhile, Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman faces the rest of his life in a U.S. prison after a three-month trial “packed with Hollywood-style tales of grisly killings, political payoffs, cocaine hidden in jalapeno cans, jewel-encrusted guns and a naked escape with his mistress through a tunnel,” according to The Associated Press.

“A jury whose members’ identities were kept secret as a security measure reached a verdict after deliberating six days in the expansive case. They sorted through what authorities called an ’avalanche’ of evidence gathered since the late 1980s that Guzman and his murderous Sinaloa drug cartel made billions in profits by smuggling tons of cocaine, heroin, meth and marijuana into the U.S.”

Yeah, a “manufactured” crisis, indeed.

• Contact Charles Hurt at churt@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter @charleshurt.