Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano accused President Donald Trump of thrice violating the separation of powers in the last week.
He described it as a “very dangerous trend” in a “Judge Napolitano’s Chambers” segment that the widely watched conservative network’s website shared online Wednesday.
Napolitano said Trump’s reported instruction to acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to divert money that Congress had authorized to buy a missile defense system to pay for a section of his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall one was instance.
“He asked Congress for the money, and the Congress said no, and he took the money anyway,” Napolitano explained. “That violates the separation of powers.”
Other instances were Trump’s direction for Shanahan to send troops to the southern border and hiking tariffs on products imported from China, which Napolitano described as “a national federal sales tax imposed by the president and not by the Congress.”
Napolitano last month dubbed Trump “unlawful, defenseless and condemnable,” which earned him a rebuke from the president on Twitter.
He concluded:
It is dangerous when presidents write their own laws, impose their own taxes, spend money how they want and Congress looks the other way. It’s dangerous because it’s too much of an accumulation of power in the presidency and it imbalances that delicate balance that the separation of powers created. We need to be careful about too much power in the hands of too few.
Check out the clip here: