Our suggestion to President Donald Trump is not to get mad but to get busy.
We’re thinking specifically of his desire to build a wall on the nation’s Southern border amid the U.S. House’s and Senate’s rejection of his declaration of a national emergency status in order to seize funds from other areas for the construction.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, who voted for the resolution against the national emergency status, even told him how.
“I support the president on border security,” he said in a statement Thursday. “I have urged him to build the 234 miles of border wall he has asked for in the fastest possible way by using $5.7 billion already approved by Congress.”
White House officials had said Trump vowed he wouldn’t forget those Republicans – 12, it turned out – who voted against the national emergency measure if they came calling for him to attend fundraisers or provide other help.
But better for him to work with the not inconsiderable amount of money he already has.
Trump, after all, will have other budgets in which to get additional wall funding, and the case for it builds each time statistics prove the problem is worsening instead of improving. We just hope it doesn’t take a terrorist act by an illegal immigrant to get the attention of wall opponents, or border deniers, as the president called them.
Of course, the president still has veto power on the issue, which could give him access to use another $3.6 billion on the border, and he utilized that power Friday.
Trump had yet to veto a bill during his two-year-plus tenure, but vetoes are not overly rare for presidents. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each used vetoes 12 times over their two terms, with four Bush vetoes being overridden and one of Obama’s.
It takes a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to override a veto, but that appears unlikely to happen. At a minimum, lawsuits would likely delay the potential use of the additional $3.6 billion.
And we hope he’ll think about what Alexander also said – that his use of the National Emergencies Act in a way his predecessors have never used it would set a dangerous precedent for the future presidencies of socialist-minded Democrats, who might see “emergencies” in needing to destroy the border wall, confiscate guns, stop oil exports or shut down offshore drilling. That, in itself, is enough to support the resolution of disapproval.