President Donald Trump may be threatening to shut the government down again if he can’t secure the money for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
But Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, believes Trump’s warning is “entirely empty.”
In her column Monday, Rubin noted how there was little appetite for another shutdown (following the longest in U.S. history) among Trump’s “Republican allies in the Senate.”
She also explained why Trump’s other option, to declare a National Emergency to release money for the wall, was “preposterous on its face.”
“To threaten for months that he’ll declared an emergency if he doesn’t get his way underscores there is no emergency,” she wrote. “Moreover, his declaration of an emergency can be overridden by a simple majority of both houses, which would be even more humiliating than Trump’s cave on the shutdown.”
Rubin concluded by contending that Trump had “even less leverage now” over securing the money to build his southern border barrier than he did when he reopened the government on Friday.
Read Rubin’s full column here.
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