Gov. Jay Inslee: Trump emergency declaration ‘a terrible decision’
Feb 18, 2019, 2:00 PM | Updated: 2:08 pm
(AP)
(AP)
While meeting with the media Monday, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee spoke out against President Trump’s emergency declaration for the southern border.
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“This is a willful action by the president to contravene the willful, obvious, consistent, bipartisan refusal in Congress to fund his vanity project,” said Gov. Inslee. “It was a terrible decision, and it was I believe an unconstitutional decision.”
Inslee also noted that he is working with state Attorney General Bob Ferguson to see what kind of effects the declaration will potentially have on Department of Defense funding in Washington state.
“We do not know what those things are yet, and will not until are there are some decisions by the Department of Defense,” said Inslee. “Legal decisions on what action to take is going to need to wait to see what ramifications there are in the state of Washington.”
Attorney General Ferguson has made a habit of taking the current presidential administration to court, filing over 30 total lawsuits since Trump has been in office.
For this latest potential lawsuit, Inslee promised swift action.
“You can be confident that we will take aggressive, and very rapid protection for Washington in the courts, as soon as we find out there’s any harm to Washingtonians, or our ability to provide services in our state,” he vowed.
Meanwhile, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is preparing a lawsuit of his own, that he told CNN he’d be “filing sometime today.”
“We’re going to try to halt the president from violating the Constitution, the separation of powers, from stealing money from Americans and states that has been allocated by Congress, lawfully,” said Becerra.
According to Becerra, roughly a dozen states will be joining the lawsuit. It’s unclear at this time if Washington is among those states.
The president hopes to create as much as $8 billion of funding for his proposed wall across the southern border with his emergency declaration, using an amalgam of funds from Congress, military construction, U.S. National Treasury forfeiture money, and drug interdiction.
