Missouri GOP officials uninvited Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) from a local Republican event after the senator voted against President Donald Trump’s national emergency to build the wall.
Missouri Republican officials uninvited Blunt from a local Lincoln Day event on April 6 after Blunt, the fourth-ranking member of Senate GOP leadership, voted against the president’s national emergency declaration.
Blunt was the one member of Senate GOP leadership to vote against the national emergency. Twelve Senate Republicans voted against Trump’s national emergency.
Wanda Martens, a member of Christian County Republican Central Committee in Missouri, said in an email to Blunt’s office:
I am so disappointed in you now that I can hardly speak. Why could you not support my president in the emergency declaration? President Trump tried every available means to work the Senate to resolve the border issue and build the much needed wall. He is well within his presidential powers to do this.
Martens added that she did not ask Sen. Blunt to support Trump on the national emergency because she was sure that he would back the president on this vote.
“Please don’t try to tell me that I don’t understand. I understand completely. I hate it when someone calls you the establishment and that you are part of the swamp, but maybe they were right,” Martens added.
Sen. Blunt contended that Congress alone has the power the appropriate money and that he has worked to find border wall money for the president, even though Congress has remained unable to pass a spending bill with significant wall funding.
Blunt explained:
There is an emergency declaration available. Presidents have used it about 58 times since 1976 when it was put into effect. But no president has ever used it this way, where (you) ask the Congress to do something, go through that whole constitutional process and then when you don’t get what you ask for that way, just decide, ‘Well, it’s an emergency.’
“The last power really left to Congress is the power to control appropriations, the power of the purse, which anybody’s ever looked at the constitution has heard that phrase over and over again. And I think it’s an important phrase,” the Missouri Republican said.
John Adams, a 74-year-old retiree who lives in south Kansas City, said he has voted for Sen. Blunt in every election he ran for office; however, Adams said he will never vote for him again.
Adams said, “I used to support Blunt. I just can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry. He’s not supporting my president in the way that I anticipated.”
Many Republican senators have said they oppose any form of executive overreach, which includes former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) illegal alien amnesty.
However, one federal district judge ruled in August 2018 that DACA was illegal, whereas many lawyers have argued that Trump has the authority under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to reappropriate money to build the wall.
Blunt’s vote against the national emergency comes as a Morning Consult/Politico poll suggests that nearly three-quarters of Republican voters would more likely vote for a candidate if they backed Trump’s national emergency on the border.
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