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President Trump to Declare National Emergency to Appropriate Funding for Border Wall; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Reportedly will Support President Trump's National Emergency Declaration; Interview with Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Aired 8-8:30a ET

Aired February 15, 2019 - 08:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


[08:00:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Under Article One of the Constitution only Congress has the power to appropriate funs. The bipartisan spending deal that was passed by Congress last night gives the president a fraction of the money that he wanted for border security, but it's for fencing and barriers, not the so-called wall. So he's now taking matters into his own hands. Democrats vow to challenge this emergency declaration.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he had actually warned the White House that many Republicans oppose this move and it faces the very real challenge of being blocked. But "The Washington Post" reports that it was McConnell who ultimately sold the president on the deal and flipped. He now vows to support the emergency declaration that he once publicly opposed. This morning on NEW DAY former Republican House member Mike Rogers summed it up this way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE ROGERS, (R) FORMER HOUSE INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN: You're watching Mitch McConnell eat a manure sandwich in this whole process.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: I think that pretty much puts a finer point on it.

We are now joined by Josh Dawsey. He's the White House reporter at "The Washington Post" who wrote about McConnell's efforts to get the president on board. Josh, is Mitch McConnell enjoying or not enjoying the manure sandwich?

JOSH DAWSEY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I don't think McConnell has enjoyed any of this episode. He counseled the president aggressively back in December to avoid the first shutdown, tried to broker a deal to get out of it before the five weeks ended unsuccessfully. Here he was determined to do almost anything he could to keep the president from considering any sort of other shutdown. It was a pretty topsy- turvy day. McConnell had at least three pretty lengthy phone calls with the president who, as he was being briefed on the particulars of the deal, changed his mind and said maybe I don't want to sign this. Could this prevent me from doing an emergency? What are the causes here? And McConnell had to really do a sales job to keep the government open yesterday.

CAMEROTA: And let's talk about that sales job. What did McConnell say in those three phone calls that got us to where we will this morning at 10:00 a.m. with this national emergency declared?

DAWSEY: The senate majority leader convinced the president he could declare a national emergency. He reminded him repeatedly about the perils of the last shutdown and how damaging it was to almost everyone involved, particularly Republicans, in the last one. And he essentially also turned down the president's idea to do another short- term spending bill so that would not work again and that it could not continually happen where there is just this fight over and over with the same outcome. And eventually he assuaged the president that signing the bill coupling with a national emergency was the right way to get out of this for now.

CAMEROTA: But help us understand, Josh, Senator McConnell's about- face, how he was able to work his way around in the space of just two weeks from really warning against a national emergency. He understands precedent. He understands that at some point Democrats will be back in power and they can use this for whatever they want. And so how did he work his way around to then convincing the president yesterday that that's the way to go?

DAWSEY: McConnell still is not necessarily a fan of a national emergency. I think what the solution here was, Alisyn, was that there had to be a way out of this. And the president was not going to just sign the spending bill and go on. And McConnell knows that a lot of members of his caucus are very opposed to the emergency. He knows it's likely to be stalled in the courts, so do the White House lawyers, for that matter. But there had to be a short-term way out of this eight-week fight. The conversation in politics and in Congress for the last eight weeks has been on the verge of a shutdown, a shutdown, more fighting over the wall, potentially another shutdown. I think if you are McConnell, you are trying to convince the president, hey, we have to get off this ramp somehow, and if takes you declaring a national emergency here, let's see how that plays out.

CAMEROTA: But in those phone calls, did Leader McConnell assure the president that he, McConnell, would be able to get Republicans on board with this?

DAWSEY: No, he did not. But he assured the president that he would encourage them to get on board. You saw already there's a number of Republican senators, even some who are usually aligned with the president, who are saying this is a bad idea, that it could be a terrible precedent, that Democrats could use a national emergency for climate change or other issues that Republicans oppose once they took control of the White House. So you are not seeing a lot of Republican support for this. But McConnell assured the president he would try to get in more.

CAMEROTA: We have also heard people in the Freedom Caucus, the far right wing of the Republican Party, say that this deal was a total capitulation. They called all the negotiations and the shutdown a total waste of three weeks. And so was Mitch McConnell's goal yesterday also trying to find a way to spin this into a win for the president, or at least not a win for Democrats?

DAWSEY: Well, he was certainly trying to find a way to end this and convince the president to do it. And the only way the president was going to do it is if he could spin it somehow as a win for himself. McConnell has said repeatedly there is no education in the second kick of a mule. That's his favorite saying about these shutdowns. And he's warned the president over and over again that you are not winning in the shutdown.

[08:05:05] This time he's trying to get the president off of this. And to get the president to sign legislation, Alisyn, you can't say, hey, you're going to sign this bill that gets you far less money than you want, actually far less than you could have gotten even before the shutdown. Just sign on the dotted line here and let's move on. The president is not going to do that. So there has to be something in it for the president. And this time it was McConnell saying, I will go along with the national emergency.

CAMEROTA: Administration, Josh Dawsey, thank you very much for sharing all of your great reporting with us.

DAWSEY: Thank you.

BERMAN: We are joined now by Jeffrey Toobin, CNN chief legal analyst, Margaret Talev, senior white correspondent for "Bloomberg News," and David Axelrod, host of "The Ax Files," former senior adviser to President Obama.

And Ax, I want to start with you, because we are all old enough to remember Republicans who were just outraged. They thought it was a horror, the idea of a president going around Congress, executive action of any kind, immigration, was something they thought was evil practically. So let's listen to what they have said about this in the past.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCONNELL: The action he has proposed would ignore the law, would reject the voice of the voters, and would impose new unfairness on law-abiding immigrants, all without solving the problem.

SEN. TED CRUZ, (R) TEXAS: We, the Senate, are waiting in our duty to stop this lawless administration and its unconstitutional amnesty.

REP. MICHAEL MCCAUL, (R) TEXAS: Immigration reform is an emotional and divisive issue. There is no doubt about that. But the president's unilateral actions to bypass Congress undermine the Constitution and threaten our democracy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: Unless apparently the president is a Republican at this point, David.

DAVID AXELROD, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: That was then and this is now. Ted Cruz has a beard now, right. So things change. But look, this was sort of a hostage drama. You could see in Mitch McConnell's face yesterday that he was sort of grudgingly stepping forward and endorsing this idea of an emergency declaration because he understands what it means down the line. But as Josh described, the worst case outcome for the Republicans would have been another shutdown. And they were going to avoid that at all costs, and this was the price of it.

And I think what you will see here, as we have seen in the last two years is that you will hear a lot of grumbling, particularly unsourced grumbling from unnamed Republican senators and congressmen. And then they will meekly submit and go along with what the president wants on this.

And look, from the president's standpoint, he was being hammered by his supporters in the infotainment industry on the right, and he didn't to submit or look like he was submitting. And even if the courts ultimately stop this, I know brother Toobin has some skepticism about whether they will. But even if the courts stop this, he will at least have been caught trying and he would have at least been defiant rather than accepting a bill that was a defeat, and there was no other way, no matter what Mitch McConnell says, no other way to describe it.

CAMEROTA: You don't think the courts will stop this being a national emergency?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN CHIEF LEGAL ANALYST: I don't know. We now have a much more conservative Supreme Court, and a conservative Supreme Court generally has been more sympathetic to claims by Republican presidents of executive authority. And if you look particularly at Brett Kavanaugh, who is the newest justice who is replacing Anthony Kennedy, he is particularly known for a solicitous view of executive power.

This is, however, such an egregious violation of the norms, and it seems to me, the law of separation of powers. The Obama rules on immigration were a lot more defensible. That's an area where the president traditionally has a lot of individual discretion. This is the power of the purse. This is about spending money, which is a core responsibility of the Congress under Article One of the Constitution. The idea that the president can simply ignore Congress and spend money on something Congress has explicitly decided not to spend money on, that's something different, and even conservatives on the court may rebel.

BERMAN: They're going to say, though, that they are basing it on a law that Congress passed, the Emergency Act of 1976. They're going to say they are using congressional action here to justify it. I don't know whether that will ultimately convince a judge or not, but that's what they'll say.

TOOBIN: You're certainly right that that will be the justification. And since that law has passed, several dozen times, every president has used it in one way or another.

[08:10:05] However, it's never been used in the face of explicit congressional opposition. It's always been in uncontroversial areas. There has never been a real court test of the National Emergencies Act. And in fact, the definition of emergency has never been even addressed by the court. And that's a core issue here of whether there's even an emergency.

BERMAN: It might be a president saying because I say so. That might literally be the definition.

TOOBIN: And it might be, and if you defer to the president on these issues, that might be enough. But we don't know.

CAMEROTA: Margaret, where does this leave Democrats at 10:00 a.m. this morning when this is announced?

MARGARET TALEV, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: I actually think the tougher question is where it leaves Republicans, and Democrats are going to do the Republicans dirty work for them I think in terms of beginning the process of trying to challenge the president. But I think we're going to see things happen on two fronts. On the one front Democrats have said already that they are going to initiate the process of doing a joint resolution that could, in theory, stop the president if it passed the House, passed the Senate. The president vetoed it and then they efforted to override. But you can just imagine the spectacle that that would create.

There's also going to be a number of lawsuits. The state of California, the governor basically last night saying bring it on, see you in court. Organizations saying they'll sue on behalf of governments in Texas, which as we know, is a red state. And so you'll see both the legislative and the court challenges begin to proceed now. I think we'll wait to see some of the exact details from the White House, but we know the contours of these initial pots of money, largely Defense money, some money out of Treasury.

Only two other things I'd point out. One is that if you go back to 2014 when you saw all those lawmakers taking issue with President Obama for how he handled DACA and immigration, you can also find a Trump tweet from 2014 taking issue with President Obama for doing just that. I expect we'll see it being bandied around quite a bit.

BERMAN: You expect we'll see that now.

(LAUGHTER)

TALEV: Yes. But we talk a lot about how President Trump, one of the takeaways from his presidency has been the stress test, testing the power of the FBI, testing the power of the intelligence community. This is the power of the press. This is an ultimate test here of Congress. And if he wins, if he prevails in court, then if the next president is a Democrat you will certainly see them take advantage of this.

BERMAN: And I will come to that in just one second, but let me you, since you called for it, and we like to provide here, this is what Donald Trump wrote in 2014. "Republicans must not allow President Obama to subvert the constitution of the United States for his own benefit and because he's unable to negotiate with Congress." That was the 2014 version of Donald Trump, not the 2019 version of Donald Trump.

TALEV: You are on the case.

BERMAN: David Axelrod, the point that Margaret was making, this does set a precedent. It really does. I had Republican Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy on last hour and he didn't want to address it. But he's a good enough lawyer to know that really it's an apples to apples argument here. If a Democrat takes the White House and wants to declare a national emergency on climate change, for instance, because he or she feels that it threatens U.S. troops stationed anywhere, it would be hard to argue that they can't, based on this.

AXELROD: Right, absolutely. But if there is one consistent principle of the Trump administration and of this president's administration, it's that he doesn't care. He doesn't believe in laws, rules, norms, institutions. He believes that whatever you need to do to get what you want is justifiable and that his power is absolute. He's been thwarted on that many times but that is his feeling, that is his philosophy. I guarantee you that he is not sitting there thinking, yes, I could do this, but what about the precedent? I don't think he cares about that. He wants to show his supporters that he is going to do whatever it takes to build this wall that he promised as a candidate. He's been beaten up. For all this veneer of toughness, any time an Ann Coulter or a Rush Limbaugh or his buddy Hannity complains, he shrivels into the fetal position. And that's what happened here.

CAMEROTA: But as Ann Coulter has pointed out, at all of the rallies, when he said, and who is going to pay for it? The answer was not Treasury forfeiture funds!

(LAUGHTER)

AXELROD: You're absolutely right. We are well past that. We are well past that. We can all stipulate that Mexico is not going to pay for this wall and that was fictious then. OK, but at the end of the day, at the end of the day, he's going to be seen as fighting in the eyes of his supporters, and that's all he cares about.

CAMEROTA: All right, David, Jeffrey, Margaret, thank you all very much.

[08:15:00] ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Now to this breaking news. A top U.S. commander tells CNN that he disagreed with President Trump's decision to pull troops from Syria. We talk to a Democratic candidate for president and military vet, Tulsi Gabbard, about the crisis in Syria next.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Then --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRAVIS KAUFFMAN, SURVIVED MOUINTAIN LION ATTACK: Started to claw at my face and neck. And that's when kind of my fear response turned into more of a fight response.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BERMAN: So, that guy fought a mountain lion and won. That's all you need to know. Much more on this remarkable story, coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: You see this first on CNN, the top U.S. commander in the war against ISIS reveals that the disagreed with President Trump's decision to withdraw troops from Syria. Here's what he told CNN's Barbara Starr.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. JOSEPH VOTEL, COMMANDER OF U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND: It would not have been my military advice at that particularly time. I think the capabilities, pressure, approach we have had in place has been working. And so, we were keen to kind of stay along that track.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Joining us now is Democratic congresswoman and Army National Guard veteran, Tulsi Gabbard. She launched her presidential campaign earlier this month.

Good morning, Congresswoman.

REP. TULSI GABBARD (D-HI), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Aloha, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: So, when you hear the commander of the soldiers there fighting, he obviously hears from commanders on the ground. When you hear him say he thinks we should stay the course and not bring troops back from Syria, I know you believe they should come home.

[08:20:03] What do you think when you hear General Votel?

GABBARD: Right. Alisyn, I think the most important question is, that's in the mind of every single service member is what is their mission? Our troops were sent in to Syria to work with Kurdish allies on the ground, to fight against and defeat ISIS. That mission should be completed.

However, you hear from some people in the administration as well as leaders in Congress that our troops should remain in Syria indefinitely in order to counter Iran, which is a mission that Congress has not authorized. It's a war that Congress has not declared.

So, I have said that our troops should come home, but they should come home in a responsible way that does not leave the Kurds on their own --

CAMEROTA: Yes.

GABBARD: -- to be slaughtered by Turkey which is a threat that Turkey has continuously made. CAMEROTA: I don't think that's what General Votel is saying. He's

saying that the fight against ISIS is not over, that ISIS has not been defeated. So, if the mission statement is to defeat ISIS, that is not complete.

GABBARD: I know there are troops on the ground, there are missions on the ground happening as we speak right now that are continuing to take out some of those very last strongholds that ISIS has in Syria. Those should be completed and our troops should come home.

CAMEROTA: So, it's not indefinite. I mean, in terms of the timing. General Votel says to stay the course. He disagrees with the president. Would you say right now troops should stay there?

GABBARD: I'm saying that our troops should complete the mission of defeating ISIS and they should come home in a responsible manner.

CAMEROTA: But you'd be comfortable with them staying there now since they have not completed that mission.

GABBARD: That's what I'm saying. That our troops should complete that mission of defeating ISIS and they should come home in a responsible way.

CAMEROTA: I want to ask about comments that you made last week that got a lot of attention. And that was about Syrian President Bashar al Assad. And you had said that you didn't think he was the enemy of the U.S. Do you want to clarify what that means to you?

GABBARD: There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That doesn't mean the United States should be waging regime change wars around the world and acting essentially as the world's police.

This is not only not helping people in these countries. We look at Iraq, Libya and Syria, for example, places where we have waged regime change wars. The lives of people in these countries has gotten far worse off. Suffering has increased. More people have been killed, destruction in their countries, or to speak of the fact that these wars, again, in each of these countries, Iraq, Libya and Syria have proven to be counter productive to our national security.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

GABBARD: They have increased and strengthened terrorist groups like ISIS, and al Qaeda in these countries and especially Iraq and Syria now. Iran has a far greater presence and influence than they have ever had before.

CAMEROTA: But isn't anyone who uses barrel bombs or cluster bombs indiscriminately against hospitals, and against schools and who uses chemical weapons on children and their own people by definition an enemy of the U.S.?

GABBARD: Like I said, there are brutal dictators and the actions are atrocious. Look, I'm a soldier. When you say there is an enemy of the United States, that implies that therefore we must go and wage war to take out the enemy because that enemy threatens the safety and security of the American people.

My point about Syria and my opposition to our regime change war that we have been waging there since 2011 is that it has not helped the well-being and the -- it has not decreased the suffering of the Syrian people. It has increased it. It's caused more destruction and it has made our country less safe. It doesn't serve our interests, nor does it serve the interests of the Syrian people.

CAMEROTA: I'm going to ask you what's happening today. What do you think about the president declaring a national emergency at 10:00 a.m. this morning, and taking -- finding $8 billion to fund his border wall?

GABBARD: This is unconstitutional. Congress, through Article 1, has the responsibility to appropriate funds for the government to serve our people. Now because President Trump has not gotten the amount of funding that he wanted to get, he is blatantly taking this action that violate it is constitution and will be taking dollars that have been appropriated for military construction projects in different parts of the country and different parts of the world and rededicating them to something he deems as apparently more important.

CAMEROTA: I want to ask you about some of your positions and how they compare and contrast to your fellow Democratic candidates for president. Medicare-for-All, I believe you support it.

GABBARD: I do.

CAMEROTA: What about the question of whether or not that eliminates private insurers?

[08:25:01] GABBARD: Medicare-for-All should not and does not eliminate private insurers. What it does is make sure that every single American is able to get the health care that they need. If people want to go into the private market, people want to go into the -- and purchase their own private insurance, it's a free country. Everybody has the right to do that. The point of Medicare-for-All is making sure that every single person is able to get the quality care that they need and that they deserve.

CAMEROTA: You are holding a press conference about the INF Treaty.

GABBARD: Yes.

CAMEROTA: What do you want us to know?

GABBARD: We are facing a greater threat of nuclear catastrophe than ever before in our country's history. This is a crisis and a threat that every single person needs to be concerned about. This is something that we in Hawaii just over a year ago experienced when there was a text message alert that came across our phones saying there was a missile headed our way and to take shelter.

There was no shelter to be found. People were putting their kids into their car trying to drive to the mountains to find a cave. A father lowered his daughter down a manhole into, you know, essentially the underground sewage to try to keep her safe.

I'm introducing legislation that will stop President Trump from withdrawing from the INF treaty and to stop him from spending taxpayer dollars to spark this new nuclear arms race.

This is the main reason I'm running for president, because these threats of regime change wars, this new cold war, this threat of nuclear war that's casting a shadow over us threatens our very future. That's what I will work to end. End the regime change wars, work to end the new Cold War and walk us back from this nuclear abyss.

CAMEROTA: Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, thank you very much for being on NEW DAY.

GABBARD: Thank you, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: John?

BERMAN: All right. A new member of Congress making a difference in her son's memory. The law she's pushing just weeks after taking office, that's next.

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