Congress Needs to Work

The Border Wall National Emergency has been on for 20 days and Trump has gone on many trips that have nothing to do with the concerns of a National Emergency beginning with a golf vacation within hours of his Emergency declaration. We can only blame Congress for not voting on stricter rules and restrictions on the power of the Presidency to even declare a National Emergency without specific conditions or even a specific definition on what merits a National Emergency anymore. When will the American people hold responsible their district Congressmen to do their job better? How can Americans get to decide what Congress should focus on? The Republican dominated Congress in the past had 53 hearings over Benghazi and they found no criminality or oversight as our law enforcement agencies deemed the tragedy was an event caused by terrorism and not any wrongdoing by Hillary or the Obama Administration. Did we need 53 hearings on just this one matter?

The 1976 National Emergency Act was originally written to limit the Presidents power. So why hasn’t it worked out that way? Jimmy Carter declared the first National Emergency in 1979 putting sanctions on IRAN in response to the hostage crisis. Since then there have been 59 declarations. 31 of those are still active and 28 involve sanctions. Of the 31 , 17 seem to merit the label National Emergency  that include nuclear attack, SYRIA funding terrorism, Russian invasion of Crimea, cyber-warfare and foreign intervention into U.S. Elections. They are bad but they may not immediately effect American interests. Then there is another 10 aimed at foreigners who may not affect the security of America but they need to be punished for injustices they do in their countries. The flaw in the Act is that once any President calls for a National Emergency they can then easily take control in areas they might not have before. Like Trump being able to take money from other approved programs and put it towards his stupid wall.

Congress DOES have the power to stop any of these at any time but they don’t. They never did because in the past we had responsible Presidents who did not abuse their power as Trump does daily. Now after the Mid-term elections we will have a more balanced Congress with new Democratic leaders taking over the majority in the House of Representatives. Trump already said he will veto any action they try to take to stop his personal wishes. All Congress needs to do is to impose stricter restrictions on the power of a President to call a National Emergency to make sure an Emergency really exist before he can impose his power. If we all have learned nothing else from the Trump Administration we learned how power can be abused in our government that was once run by strong educated experienced leaders who have  governing experience and  who had lives built on morals, ethics and integrity all of which Trump does not have.