Cline stands by Trump on “national emergency”

Congressman Cline joined all but a few principled Republicans to oppose a resolution nullifying President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border.

Nevertheless a majority of the House of Representatives approved the resolution and sent it to the Senate.

After Congress refused to appropriate all the money Trump wanted for a border wall, the president declared the emergency in an effort divert other funds for the project without Congressional approval.

Cline told Roanoke Times columnist Dan Casey of his plans last week:

“I support [Trump’s] declaration of an emergency,” he said. “My reading of the statute is that [Trump] has a very limited authority to redirect the money to construction projects [provided] those projects are a military activity.”

As Senator Tim Kaine noted in a letter to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Trump wants to use his emergency declaration to reallocate $3.5 billion from the military construction budget already approved by Congress. Kaine asked from which projects the Department of Defense plans to divert funds. There has been no answer to Kaine’s question.

And when Trump said “I didn’t need to do this,” he admitted it was not an emergency.

When he was running for Congress in 2018, Cline declared:

I am sick and tired of our elected officials and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. trampling all over our Constitution and the Republic it set forth.

There is a reason I actually carry around a Constitution wherever I go.
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Going forward, Congress must reestablish the supremacy of the Constitution and protect our Constitutional rights. The status quo, perpetuated by the special interests and swamp monsters that have invaded Washington, must be upended.

We must elect a Congressman who will fight to ensure neither the Judicial nor Executive branches take over powers from the Legislative branch…

Cline might want to pull that Constitution out of his pocket and look up Article I, Section 9.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”

Before the House vote, conservative columnist George Will wrote:

Every Republican who supports the president in this trashing of the Constitution… thereby violates his or her sworn oath to defend it and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it. Voters should expel all of them from public life.

Congressman Cline: What is your breaking point? What will it take for you to put the interests of your constituents and the nation ahead of the interests of your party and the president?