A new poll finds that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the President’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border to make an end run around Congress to get funding for his wall:
About six in 10 Americans oppose President Trump’s national emergency declaration to fund a wall along the southern border.
Sixty percent of Americans voiced disapproval to the move Trump made last month, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. The survey found that 53 percent of Americans strongly disapproved of using a national emergency to divert military funds for construction of a border while seven percent said they “somewhat” disapprove.
Meanwhile 39 percent of Americans said they did support a national emergency to fund a border wall. Just 1 percent of Americans are unsure
The poll comes weeks after Trump declared a national emergency to allocate unappropriated funding to building a border wall. Trump made the announcement as he agreed to sign a Congressional spending bill without the $5.7 billion in funds he wanted for a steel barrier along the border.
These results are roughly identical to numbers we saw from polling that took place just after the end of the government shutdown when the President both signed the bill funding the government through the end of the Fiscal Year and declared a national emergency even though he admitted at the time that he “didn’t need to do it” and that his main motivation for making an end run around Congress was because of his frustration and not getting what he wanted out of the negotiations that ended the budget crisis. It’s also consistent with polling taken during the government shutdown — see here, here, and here — showing that a majority of Americans opposed the border wall itself. In this respect, it is entirely unsurprising.
Even with these numbers, though, public opinion is unlikely to have much of an impact on the situation at this point. The President isn’t going to revoke his emergency declaration, and with the exception of a handful of Republican Congressmen and Senators, very few Republicans are going to break with their party to support the resolution disapproving of the Presidents declaration, which will apparently pass the Senate only to face a veto which will not be overridden. This means that we will have to look to the Courts and the various lawsuits that have been filed against the Presidents declaration in the past two weeks. While that is the way the system is supposed to work, it would be nice if the voters’ Representatives in Washington actually reflected the will of the people on an issue like this. Unfortunately, we’ve got an entire political party in Washington that appears to exist solely to protect the current occupant of the White House rather than reflect the will of the people they represent.
