Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance, told Breitbart News that 95 percent of Republican voters support President Trump using “emergency powers” to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall. He also warned that Trump support from Republican voters would collapse if he failed to build the wall.
Meckler referenced data from the Ear to the Ground Listening Project in a Tuesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.
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Meckler said, “I travel a lot around among the grassroots in the country. I’ve been in 45 states in the last couple of years, and just in the last couple of weeks I’ve been in Kentucky and Arkansas, Texas, and California. Here’s what I hear from the base. They still support the president, and I think a large part of it is, what’s the alternative, right? It’s weak Republicans or it’s the Democrats.”
Meckler continued, “They support [Donald Trump] in regards to building the wall. They’re fundamentally in support of building the wall. That’s a big part of the reason he got elected, and they’re pretty disappointed with the fact that he did not hold out during the government shutdown. He appears to have have capitulated. He said, ‘Who’s going to blink first?’ Well, it appears that Trump blinked. I think they still support him.”
Meckler explained, “We just did polling with the Ear to the Ground Project out of Frontier Labs. We polled over 2,800 people. These are people who were primarily Trump primary voters. One of the things we found is — while they still support him at the same levels before he caved — on a scale of one to seven, seven being the highest level of support, he drops from a 6.78 to a 3.97 if he doesn’t get the wall done in the next couple of weeks.”
Meckler assessed, “So what they’re saying is, ‘We’re with you, Mr. President, but our support is wavering, and you’d better make your promises happen.'”
Mansour echoed Meckler’s observations: “You can hear it from our listeners and everybody. It makes sense.”
The aforementioned poll found: “Trump voters are divided as to who won the shutdown showdown, but only 43% said President Trump could consider it a victory.” It warned that Trump “could lose the base” if he fails to procure funds for wall construction:
[Trump voters] gave him a 6.78 level of support on January 1, 6.71 today – but would score him 3.82 if he fails to secure border security funds, a drop of 43%.
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Donald Trump primary voters say their support for the President had waned slightly between January 1, 2019, to today, from a weighted average of 6.84 to 6.77 (on a seven-point scale), but said that if he fails to secure additional border security funds, that support would also drop 43% to a weighted average of 3.88.
Mansour asked Meckler about Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)’s argument that President Trump can use 10 United States Code § 284 to deploy the military to build the wall without actually having to use his presidential emergency powers to do so.
Meckler explained, “As a lawyer, I’ve read that code section. I think it’s actually a stretch, and I think [Donald Trump] would lose that one in court, and here’s why. If you read it generally, if you read the beginning of that code section, it talks about the Secretary of Defense providing support for counter-drug activities or other activities, counter-transnational organized crime, I think that sounds like it applies, and I think it sounds like it applies clearly.”
Meckler went on, “When you get to the subsection about what purposes it may be used for, it’s for maintenance and repair of equipment. So it’s for transportation of personnel. It’s for bases of operation. I don’t see anything in here as a lawyer where I think you could fairly say it would be for the building of permanent structures along the border. I think it’s pretty hard.”
Meckler added, “Even assuming that I’m wrong, you’re going to have 9th Circuit ruling that’s going to block the president if we’re doing any of this stuff. We all know that the 9th Circuit or the 5th Circuit are going to rule against the president in rogue measure, and they’re going to stop him from doing these things, and we’re going to end up in a court fight, ultimately, which is likely to last years.”
However, Meckler noted that there is overwhelming support from the Republican base for Trump to use emergency powers to build the wall.
Meckler stated, “We polled this, as well. Over 95 percent of Republican voters say that they believe [Donald Trump] should use emergency powers to build the wall, so it plays very strongly to the base. So for those reasons it seems like a favorable thing to do.
Meckler warned, “What I fear about this is further expansion of executive power. It would be my preference that we find a way to do this through regular rule of law — regular order — than have the president declare an emergency, because God forbid we get into a situation where we let presidents do things by the stroke of a pen, by declaring an emergency. I think we’ve seen enough of that, already, and I’d hate to see Republicans expand that power.”
Meckler lamented what he described as the federal judiciary’s unconstitutional expansion of its power over time.
“This is one of my great frustrations,” stated Meckler, “that we have a judiciary that’s out of control in the United States of America that’s well-exceeded the boundaries of the Constitution, not upholding the rule of law. Frankly, I think it’s about time we start impeaching some of these federal judges.”
Meckler described the expansion of governmental power as amounting to a “deep state” unaccountable to citizens
“It is the deep state,” remarked Meckler. “In other words, it’s government outside the control of the people. I wish I could say it was one branch of government that was the problem. Congress has abdicated its authority. Presidents have both exceeded and abdicated their authority. The courts have far overstepped the boundaries of the Constitution or anything that the Founders ever intended.”
Meckler explained, “Remember, the Founders said their biggest fear for the courts was that the courts would be too weak because they had neither the power of the purse nor the sword, and yet here we have the real supreme branch of the United States government, today — the federal courts — and of course the Supreme Court being the ultimate arbiter of everything in this country. I think we just have a federal government that’s out of control, fundamentally, at its root.”
Meckler described the Democrat Party as “evil.”
“The thing about the Democrats today that is so infuriating to me is that they are literally anti-human,” said Meckler. “They are pro-human trafficking and pro-rape and pro-children molestation. They are pro-drug trafficking. They are pro-illegal alien crime. It’s incredible to think that they are standing for all of these things against American citizens, and frankly, even against the people that they call Dreamers, right?”
Meckler went on, “Deals have been offered up for these Dreamers; folks who were brought here not of their own accord, brought here as children, and the president is offering to make deals in regards to those people, and the Democrats have sold them out completely for raw politics.”
Meckler stated, “I think we’re entered a new phase in American politics which is very disturbing to me, which is — I’ll just say it straight up; I don’t like to pull punches — the Democrats have become the party of evil. When you can stare in the face of these immigrants who are being taken advantage of — I’ve seen numbers as high as 60 percent of women sexually assaulted on the trip to the United States to illegally cross the borders, children being molested, tens of thousands of children being trafficked, we’re talking human trafficking of young children, we’re talking about death from overdose from all these drugs passing over our borders, we’re talking about violent crime against American citizens — when you look all those things in the face and still play politics, which is what the Democrats are doing, that goes beyond politics, it goes beyond opinion, or ideology, or simple differences, it goes into the realm of evil. And I would argue today the Democrats have become the party of evil in America.”
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