On Feb. 15, President Donald Trump announced a national emergency to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. 

Since that announcement, many law enforcement officials, politicians and experts on immigration and border crime have spoken out against the declaration. They have said that the emergency declaration will take important money out of other government programs, is an overstep of the president’s authority and will not do enough to stop border crime. 

These experts are the people we should be consulting for any important government expenditure on border security, and the fact that they are being ignored is another testament to the deafness and bullish pig-headedness of the current administration. 

Trump says he plans to pull a large chunk of the funding for his wall from a military construction fund. That fund has already been allocated to other military projects, things that have been vetted by military experts and Congress. Now, with over $3 billion coming from that fund, plenty of military projects meant to actually protect American citizens are being squandered on a project that could not even make it through the Republican-controlled government from 2016 to 2018. 

In an interview with Military.com, Mark Cancian, an advisor with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the wall will likely take years, and the lawsuits coming from the declaration of the national emergency are only going to stretch that timeframe out further.

One of the most impactful parts of this entire political melodrama is the implication of what the president has actually tried to do. With his declaration of a national emergency, Trump attempted to do exactly what news pundits have been saying for weeks and make an “end-run around Congress.” This not only violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution, but it has the potential to make that legal, and even the norm, for future American presidents. 

The only bright light at the end of this tunnel is that even the president’s own party, all the way up to Sen. Mitch McConnell, have seemed to declare that this move is not the correct one. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, and Trump will head right back to the start, with no wall, no money for a wall and a firm rebuke from both sides of the political sphere that trampling on the Constitution will not be allowed. 

With a presidential election coming in 2020, and Trump’s position on the wall already weakened by his own admission on the campaign trail to a stadium filled with people and press that he “didn’t need to do this,” even with this dramatic move, the government will end up working on common-sense, fact-based border security measures.