Government by decree alive and well in Washington

Even senior Republicans are worried about President Trump's declaration of a national emergency to build his Mexico wall. They are worried about its legality but actually more worried that a future Democratic president might invoke the same sort of edict based on the precedent set by Trump. Ok there was a national emergency delcaration by George W Bush after 9/11 but no one disagreed with that. It didn't set the sort of precedent which Trump has now done with his decision to snatch billions of dollars from the Pentagon budget to pay for the wall. The Pentagon has been expecting this development for some weeks. Jim Mattis who resigned as US defence secretary in protest at Trump's decision to withdraw all American troops from Syria apparently even suggested a national emergency declaration as the only way the president was going to get funding for his wall. I can't believe Mattis would have wanted Trump to grab a chunk of his hard-fought defence budget to start building it. But Trump has had it in mind for some time that the Pentagon would be the department to raid for the required funds. His argument being that a wall was all about security, the military was in the security business, ergo let them build and fund the wall. The Pentagon has a huge budget, increasing from $700 billion to $716 billion this year and maybe to $750 billion for 2020. So if the Pentagon lawyers advise that wall-building on the nation's borders is not a legitimate use of military money and expertise, it could cause more problems for the president. But clearly that is not going to happen. Trump said out of the blue recently that he was going to give the Pentagon $750 billion next year, so the defence department is hardly going to quibble over $5 billion for the president's pet project. But there will still be a lot of angst in the departments to be most affected by the wall emergency, particularly those who have been putting money aside for improving living quarters for troops and their families. The one thing I can't understand is that the White House seems to have earmarked more than $2 billion to come out of the Pentagon's drug-interdiction programme. Eh? I thought one of his reasons for wanting to build the wall was to stop drug traffickers entering the United States across the border. But he knows from being told so by his intelligence boys that it's the US Navy and Coast Guard who prevent literally tons of cocaine and other drugs from getting into the US. Any defunding from their efforts would be welcomed by the drug barons!