"President Trump is manufacturing a crisis and declaring a made-up 'national emergency' in order to seize power and subvert the constitution," said California Governor Gavin Newsome. "We will have a national emergency, and we will then be sued," Trump said Friday. Dangerous precedentTrump invoked the 1976 National Emergencies Act after Congress refused to allocate his requested $5.7 billion for a wall in a spending bill. It is a precedent-setting move, said American University law professor Jennifer Daskal, adding that the National Emergencies Act had "never been used in that way, for good reason." The emergencies act "does not provide any explicit limitations on what does and does not constitute a national emergency," Daskal told AFP.

Source: Philippine Star February 16, 2019 07:30 UTC