Law Professor Explains the Major Difference Between Obamacare Case, Trump's Declaration
George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley explained the difference between President Donald Trump’s upcoming national emergency case and the funding of Obamacare on “Fox & Friends” Friday.
“They’re using the case where I represented the House of Representatives against Obamacare. And we won. But this is not the same case,” Turley said.
“What President (Barack) Obama did was order the treasury essentially to be opened up and to pay insurance companies. That’s a different type of funding.”
“What Trump is going to do is he’s going to use money that was appropriated by Congress. It just doesn’t have these tight conditions on them. That’s Congress’ decision to make. They can appropriate money and not put many conditions on.
“So it’s going to be a different fight,” he continued.
Turley predicted Trump’s national emergency will face court challenges but said Democrats will lose on the merits because Congress has already bestowed this power onto the president.
“So there’s two issues here for the court. The authority, the source of the authority to declare the emergency and the source of the funds. On the source of authority, they will lose in a spectacular fashion because they gave this authority to the president (in 1976),” he said. “He and other presidents have virtually unfettered authority to declare an emergency.
“On the funds, this is not our case from the Obamacare fight. They will have a much more difficult time in challenging all of these funds.
“Remember, the president can start construction with the money Congress just gave him. And even if they knocked out one or two of these sources he still has plenty to go pretty far down that road.”
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