Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a retiring lawmaker who has already expressed his distaste for President Donald Trump’s national emergency, hammered home his point Thursday, calling the executive runaround “unwise and unnecessary.”
“I support what the President wanted to do on border security, but I do not support the way he has been advised to do it,” Alexander said, careful to use the passive voice. “It is unnecessary and unwise to turn a border crisis into a constitutional crisis about separation of powers when the President already has congressional funding authority to build a 234 miles of border wall that he requested in his January 6 letter to the Senate.”
Alexander: “Unnecessary and unwise” to use national emergency for border wall pic.twitter.com/DGQ1zcEFY6
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) February 28, 2019
Alexander’s imminent retirement has freed him up to buck Trump and the party on certain issues. He voted with the Democrats in January to reopen the government with a clean funding bill sans wall funding.
