Congress has until Feb. 15 to discuss a border security deal, but the White House is already finalizing its plan B — declaring a national emergency.
The White House is finalizing details of a potential national emergency declaration to secure President Donald Trump’s border wall, even as lawmakers are trying to broker an immigration deal that could avert another shutdown in just over two weeks.
Trump met with his budget chief, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner and other top officials, including White House lawyers, on Tuesday to walk through the logistics of such a move. And White House aides have been quietly meeting with outside conservative political groups to build support for the president to take such an action. Those talking points, which emphasize Trump’s legal authority, have begun to show up in such conservative media outlets as Breitbart News.
The behind-the-scenes maneuvers indicate that the administration wants to be poised to quickly declare a national emergency, should Trump choose to do so, by the time Congress hits its Feb. 15 deadline to strike a deal before government funding again runs out. And it signals that White House officials may not have much faith in congressional Republicans to secure the funding in the coming weeks that Trump seeks to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump himself has said the odds of a congressional deal are “less than 50-50.”
One senior White House official told POLITICO the goal is to have such a declaration 100 percent ready and coordinated should Trump decide to move on it rather than scrambling ex post facto to draw up and justify one.
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