Democrats Decry Supreme Court Decision Allowing Trump To Use Military Funds For Border Wall
The United States Supreme Court ruled on Friday that President Donald Trump can start using military funds to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Leading Democrats are denouncing the decision, according to a new report from Mother Jones.
“This is a deeply regrettable and nonsensical decision and flies in the face of the will of Congress and the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a strong statement as well, accusing Trump of “stealing” military funds “to spend on a wasteful, ineffective border wall.”
Representative Rashida Tlaib went a step further than Schumer and Pelosi, calling for impeachment.
“It’s time to impeach folks. Our country demands it,” she tweeted.
White House hopefuls Kamala Harris and Cory Booker also took issue with the Supreme Court ruling.
“Let’s be clear: Trump’s wall has never been about keeping the American people safe,” Harris tweeted, sharing a Washington Post article about the issue.
Booker called Trump’s border wall a “vanity project,” vowing to “fight back” against “this wrong and misguided decision.”
Chair of the Democratic National Committee Tom Perez issued a brief but stern statement, calling the wall “unnecessary and ineffective,” and denouncing the Supreme Court decision as “wrong.”
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, the Supreme Court ruling came following an intense legal battle on multiple fronts, and amid strong pushback from advocacy groups and civil liberties organizations.
First, U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam in California ruled that $2.5 of the $6 billion in military dollars cannot be used to fund the expensive border project. Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued against the ruling, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to temporarily halt the injunction.
In the end, the matter reached the Supreme Court, which handed Trump a major legal victory.
Trump allies praise Supreme Court decision on using military funds for border wall https://t.co/WQwbmZiBFk pic.twitter.com/t7K9kIKS9b
— The Hill (@thehill) July 27, 2019
Trump’s insistence on building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border in what he claims is an effort to curb illegal immigration and criminal activity has created tensions between branches of government in the past, much like other anti-immigration policies championed by the president and his allies.
Although Trump campaigned as an immigration hardliner and governs as one, the Obama administration still holds the record for most deportations, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents.
As The Washington Post reported, in 2018, Trump deported 256,000 individuals, but his numbers are still lower than Obama’s, who deported 409,849 undocumented migrants in 2012.
There are, however, significant differences between Trump’s and Obama’s immigration policies, according to Vox. For instance, both presidents have instructed law enforcement officials to separate families, but during the Obama era, that was done “only in extraordinary circumstance.”
