of japanese extraction, most of them americane citizens. in writing about that case, justice robert jackson said, emergency powers are like a loaded weaponre laying there waiting for someone to pick it up.k it s still laying there. and the president could very well say i tried in this speech tonightn the soft approach. now i have to resort to the powers thatso i have. andt i think people would be astonished if they understood the vast discretion that congress has rashly, in my judgment, often from sloth, often fromdg inattention, have given toti executives of all powers. of all parties. and, gene, it seemed to me, given george s warning about the emergency power that the president might invoke is still there, it felt like a retreat tonight. it just seemed like such a quiet
government shutdown actually wants then shutdown. each side is always doing everything they can to avoid it. and so it s not surprising that the man who s least equipped to do this job is sitting in the oval office apparently without any tools to get out of this. yes. generally, presidents win the shutdowns because presidents speak with a single voice and congress speaks with 535 voices and trump is 535 in politics. in this case, the president in that famous episode in the oval office, what, a week or so ago, when he proudly took ownership of this, he played into a the hands of mr. schumer and miss pelosi. so the president said he owned it, debut, again, mark my words tonight, hey was very soft. he begans in his first sentenc he described this as a humanitarian and security issue. humanitarian first. he went on to talk about a cyclt of human suffering. this was, believe it or not, the
kinder, gentler, mr. trump. but there is justice jackson s metaph metaphorical loaded weapon sitting there and if he chooses to pick it up andme use it, do t count on courts considering this something they want to intervene in. let s listen to what nancy pelosi said in response to the president in what she described as the humanitarian challenge. the fact is that women and children at the border are not a security threat. they are humanitarian challenge. a challenge that president trump s own cruel and policies have ve only deepened and the fact is president trump must stop holding american people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis, must re-open the government. maria teresa, your reaction to what speaker pelosi had to say. i think everybody could agree we have a humanitarian crisis at
speech, and lawrence, that s the news tonight. we re all familiar with the sherlock holmes story in which the crucial clues, what didn t happen, it s the dog that didn t bark. what happened tonight is that theba president did not fulfill his threat, which still loiters there of declaring a national emergency. the president is already under statutory authority imposing steel andau aluminum tariffs an quotas on countries including countries that are omilitary allies of the united states. in the name of national security. our this is because congress is under control bye both parties have given presidents of both parties enormous discretion to wielden executive power in the name of national security, so perhaps weti have not heard the last of this. in 19 hav44, the disgraceful ca wherein the supreme court rat y ratified the president s president roosevelt s internment of 100 and some thousand people
of how to get where he promised to get. and to actually build this thing. andth so he just, he wanted to blame it all on theju democrats. the democrats made me do it. ma maria teresa, your reactio well, i think once again we saw the president do double speak. he started by saying all the crimes that are committed and i think that everyone could agree that anye family that suffers theat hand of any loved one tha gets hurt, we re all against that. buturll he did double speak whe said that he wants to make sure thatts there s a wall on the southern border because s there aso humanitarian crisis. because oven accompanied minors that are right now at the hands of a coyotes. well, guess what, he exacerbated this issue because last year the president zeroed out a program for central american minors who can seek asylum safety in their home countries. it was established by the obama administration after the last timeni we saw humanitarian cris back in 2014. so the president is directly invol