
It’s easy to view President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency as a joke, particularly when the president himself said while making the declaration, “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”
Much of the conversation around President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency has focused on its partisan and procedural effects: how it will allow the president to frustrate Congress and redirect spending, how future presidents might use the precedent to do the same, the absence of any immediate emergency as the word is normally defined. And the aadministration has so far been unable …