Nancy Pelosi just suffered another embarrassing defeat on the House floor when the GOP held firm with Trump.
Only 13 GOP reps switched and voted with the Democrats, falling far short of the number Nancy Pelosi needed to override Trump’s veto for the wall emergency.
This effectively stops the resolution to override Trump’s veto leaving the executive order intact - until the courts step in, which will happen.
From Fox News: House Democrats on Tuesday failed to override President Trump’s first veto as part of their battle over border security, representing a victory for the administration that allows the president’s declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border to stand.
The president had vetoed a Democrat-backed measure to cancel that emergency. The House voted 248-181 on Tuesday in favor of overriding – but this fell 38 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed. Only 14 Republicans voting in favor of the veto override.
The outcome of the vote, while not surprising, now enables Trump to move forward on an issue that was a hallmark of his 2016 presidential campaign and of his presidency. Yet the vote also gave Democrats a way to focus on policy differences with Trump, days after Attorney General William Barr gave the president a boost by saying Special Counsel Robert Mueller had found no evidence Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.
“Both chambers of Congress – a Democratic House and a Republican Senate – resoundingly rejected the President’s sham emergency declaration by passing H.J.Res.46,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, and Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said shortly after the vote in a joint statement. “The President’s lawless emergency declaration clearly violates the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, and Congress will work through the appropriations and defense authorization processes to terminate this dangerous action and restore our constitutional system of balance of powers.”
Republicans argue that Trump has merely acted under a 1976 law that lets presidents declare national emergencies. Trump’s declaration was the 60th presidential emergency under that statute, but the first aimed at spending that Congress explicitly denied, according to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks the law.
Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., said Trump was acting against the “radical left in this House that would dissolve our borders entirely if given the chance” — a stance that no Democrat has taken — while Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Mich., called the veto override effort “a partisan whack job” because of its certain defeat.
