Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy and windy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 14m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred ninetieth day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and the city’s Finance Committee also at 6 PM.
On this day in 1914, Pres. Wilson delivers to Congress his Fourteen Points on his administration’s war and peace aims.
Recommended for reading in full:
Robert Chesney asks Can President Trump Fund the Wall by Declaring a National Emergency?:
President Trump has announced that he will address the nation on Tuesday at 9:00pm Eastern Standard Time, in relation to his ambition to have
MexicoU.S. taxpayers fund a $5 billion border wall. Perhaps it will be no more than an effort at rhetorical positioning, as the White House and House Democrats struggle to assure the other is blamed for the mounting ill-effects of the shutdown. But it also is possible that the speech will be a platform for Trump to declare a formal emergency under the National Emergencies Act of 1976, and from that foundation to invoke certain statutory authorities that he might claim enable him to get the funding he needs by redirecting military construction funds.In case that occurs, I’ve got a primer on what you need to know to track what is happening and how it is likely to play out. (And whether it occurs or not, I’ve also got a bingo card for you to use during his speech).
(The full post offers Chesney’s eight points of analysis.)
Margaret Taylor considers Declaring an Emergency to Build a Border Wall: The Statutory Arguments:
Building a wall was one of the central promises of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The Trump administration initially requested that Congress appropriate $25 billion for the project after Mexico refused to pay for it, as Trump had promised on the campaign trail, but Congress specifically denied the funds in 2017 and 2018. After Congress passed a number of stopgap measures to continue funding the government while talks continued on money for the wall, on Dec. 22 Trump refused to sign another temporary measure, which caused the government to shut down.
In short, the president is looking for a way to end the government shutdown while keeping his campaign promise to build the wall. But in the absence of an appropriate statutory authority on which to rely to build the wall, such action would be unconstitutional: Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution assigns the role of making laws to Congress, and Article I, Section 9 specifies that “[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The question, therefore, is what existing statutory authorities the president could reasonably rely on to use already-appropriated funds to build the wall.
(Taylor’s full analysis addresses the topic in three sections: Construction Authority, Declaring an Emergency, and Other Possibilities.)