Sen. Thom Tillis said in a column posted Monday evening that he will oppose President Trump’s declaration of a border-security emergency.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post, the North Carolina Republican said he would support a resolution blocking Mr. Trump’s decree when it comes before the Senate.
“I would vote in favor of the resolution disapproving of the president’s national-emergency declaration, if and when it comes before the Senate,” he concluded the column after laying out his support for Mr. Trump’s border-security agenda in general and criticizing Democrats’ obstructionism on the matter.
But he said it’s a matter of separation of powers and warned Republicans that declaring states of emergency to get around Congress could come back to bite them.
“As a U.S. senator, I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress. As a conservative, I cannot endorse a precedent that I know future left-wing presidents will exploit to advance radical policies that will erode economic and individual freedoms,” he wrote.
A disapproval resolution is scheduled to come before the Democratic-led House on Tuesday and passage is expected.
However while Mr. Tillis’s opposition gets the measure closer to passage in the Senate, Mr. Trump has already warned he will veto the resolution of disapproval, which would cancel the emergency declaration.
Once that happened a two-third vote in both chambers would be needed to override Mr. Trump’s veto, and Republicans in the House, where party discipline is much tighter than in the Senate, easily have enough votes to block that.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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