Yesterday the House easily passed a privileged resolution that would block Trump’s national emergency declaration.
Now the resolution heads to the Senate and all eyes are on Republicans that may vote against it. Right now there are three: Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski.
All they need is one more.
That brings us to Ted Cruz, who hasn’t said one way or the other on how he will vote. That’s because he’s still investigating the White House’s defense of the declaration to ensure that it follows the law:
STAR TELEGRAM – Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of the Senate’s most knowledgeable experts on constitutional law, remains skeptical of the merits of President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to build a border wall, he told the Star-Telegram Tuesday.
“I am still assessing the legal authority of the arguments that the administration is putting forward,” Cruz said after a meeting with White House lawyers off the Senate chamber earlier that day.
“I emphatically agree that we have a crisis at the border and that we need to solve it, and I am grateful that the president and the administration are leading to secure the border and to build a wall,” said Cruz, who is among the Senate’s toughest border security voices.
“At the same time I’ve long said that any president, Republican or Democrat, must follow the constitution and must follow the laws,” added Cruz, a constitutional lawyer who made his career suing the federal government for overreach as Texas’ solicitor general.
“So I’m taking the time to consider and analyze the specific statutory authorities the administration is relying upon and their arguments as to why they might apply,” Cruz said.
I expect that Cruz will end up coming to the same conclusion as Mike Lee, who believes the national emergency is legal:
My initial assessment is that what Pres. Trump announced is legal. Whether or not it should be legal is a different matter. Congress has been ceding far too much power to the exec. branch for decades. We should use this moment as an opportunity to start taking that power back.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) February 15, 2019
But you never know. In his exhaustive analysis he may end up disagreeing and vote for the resolution. Clearly he wants to get this right so that he can take a principled position on it one way or the other.
But at the end of the day, even if Cruz votes with Democrats, Trump will veto the bill and it will die. Because it’s extremely unlikely that 2/3rds of the Senate and the House will override his veto.