Guess Which Republican Will Vote to Block Trump’s Emergency Order

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the woman who puts the NO in RINO, said Wednesday that she would gladly join Democrats in voting to block President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border. Collins, who had already signaled her constitutional disapproval of the move, said at a Coast Guard ceremony that the president’s actions “completely undermine” the role of Congress.

“If it’s a clean disapproval resolution,” she said, “I will support it.”

Collins made similar remarks to a Maine news station the previous day.

“I am strongly opposed to the president invoking his national emergency powers,” she said. “I don’t believe that’s what the law was intended to cover.”

While Collins is the first Republican to publicly signal that she will support legislation to block the president, she is not the only GOP member in Congress to express reservations about Trump’s decision to move forward with an emergency declaration. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who can usually be found hanging onto Collins’ coattails, said last week that she did not “think that this is a matter that should be declared a national emergency.”

How easy it is for senators from Maine and ALASKA to say that there’s no emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

President Trump ultimately decided to declare the emergency after being able to get no more than $1.375 billion for the wall out of obstructionist Democrats on Capitol Hill. Some have estimated that the emergency declaration could free up as much as $8 billion in Pentagon funds that could be put towards the construction of the wall.

That’s if Congress – or the courts – don’t put a stop to it.

This week, a coalition of 16 states filed suit against the administration in an attempt to prevent Trump from going forward with the wall on his own. They were joined by a second lawsuit – this one filed by the ACLU – on Tuesday.

And then there are the Democrats, who have vowed to put forward a resolution of disapproval as early as Friday. This resolution will almost certainly pass the House, which will give it a fighting chance to survive the Senate as well. Trump will surely veto such a bill the moment it hits his desk, but it could expose a larger intraparty fracture than Republicans are comfortable admitting to.

As for Collins, who knows what this woman is up to? If she’s trying to paint herself as the Republican for Democrats, she spent all of that political capital with her Kavanaugh vote. She must be looking at that sweet deal Jeff Flake just made with CBS and is hoping she can replicate something like that when she retires from the Senate. Well, good luck to her. We reckon that politicians have sold out their principles and their country for less.