Senate Votes to Terminate Trump’s National Emergency Border

The Republican-run Senate rejected President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border on Thursday.

The Senate voted 59-41 to cancel Trump’s February proclamation of a border emergency, which he invoked to spend $3.6 billion more for border barriers than Congress had approved.

Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer released this statement after voting in approval of the of the national emergency declaration:

“The question before Senators as they voted today was whether or not they agree with the president that the crisis at our southern border is a national emergency. I do. The month of February saw record-breaking unauthorized southwest border crossings, which soared to more than 76,000 people. Securing our southern border is an urgent national security issue that must be addressed to keep our country and our families safe,” Fischer said in the release.

Senator Ben Sasse released this statement after also voting in favor of President Trump’s declaration:

“We have an obvious crisis at the border — everyone who takes an honest look at the spiking drug and human trafficking numbers knows this — and the President has a legal path to a rapid response under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (NEA). I think that law is overly broad and I want to fix it, but at present Nancy Pelosi doesn’t, so I am therefore voting against her politically motivated resolution.  As a constitutional conservative, I believe that the NEA currently on the books should be narrowed considerably. That’s why I’m an original sponsor of Senator Lee’s legislation, and it is why I have repeatedly gone to the White House to seek support for NEA reform.

“I urge both the Majority and Minority Leaders to assist in moving this legislation through committee and quickly to the Floor for debate, negotiation, and passage through the full Senate. If this Congress is serious in its concerns about decades of executive overreach, we will devote ourselves to systematically reclaiming powers Congress has been imprudently granting to presidents of both parties for far too long. Today’s resolution doesn’t fix anything because the root problem here can’t be fixed with bare-knuckled politics but rather with a deliberate debate about the powers that Congress has been giving away and that the Executive has therefore claimed.”