House Passes Bill, Blocks Trump's State of Emergency Over Wall

With a vote of 245-182, the House passed a bill Tuesday terminating U.S. President Donald Trump’s state of emergency declared in a desperate attempt to order construction of the infamous wall along the Mexican-US border.

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Despite Trump’s threats to veto the legislation, house representatives blocked the president’s attempts to use funds set aside by Congress for expenditures to realize his plans for the controversial border wall.

Democrats and some Republicans worry that with the emergency declaration unilaterally funding his border wall without lawmakers’ approval, Trump was presenting a dangerous challenge to the constitutional balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch of government.

The bill now travels to the Republican-run Senate where, if passed, will be put into action if not vetoed by the president first.

Hours before the House vote, Republican Senator John Barrasso, a member of the Senate’s leadership, told MSNBC in an interview that the legislation “may actually pass the Senate.”

During floor debate, Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro, the main sponsor of the controversial legislation, said, “There is no emergency at the border,” adding, “Border crossings are at a four-decades low.”

In his first two years in office, Trump’s Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, which under the U.S. Constitution holds the national purse strings.

During that time they failed to appropriate all the money Trump was seeking to build a wall. This year, with Democrats in control of the House, Congress refused Trump’s demand for $5.7 billion in wall funding. Instead, he got $1.37 billion for border barriers this fiscal year.

Angry over that decision, Trump declared the emergency and vowed to divert funds toward the wall from accounts already committed by Congress for other purposes.