Column: Students weigh in on Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency
Last week, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to request additional funding for the border wall.
Within hours, multiple politicians and thousands of citizens weighed in on their opinion of what constitutes a national emergency.
Hillary Clinton tweeted the following in response to Trump’s tweets regarding the declaration:
“The real national emergencies:
-Relentless gun violence.
-Children separated from their families at the border.
-Climate change.
-Americans dying for lack of health care.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, commented on Trump’s later statements to the press. The quote in question was, “I didn’t need to do this...I just wanted to get it done faster, that’s all.”
She responded, “’I didn’t need to do this’ is admitting that it isn’t an emergency at all. ‘I didn’t need to do this’ means he’s faking a crisis.”
Regarding the influx of criticism and diverse opinions regarding what constitutes as a national crisis, USC Aiken students had their own opinions.
“I do think his decision to name it a national emergency is a bit important,” expressed Courtney Poda, “but we do have more important matters to think about...one of them being separation of immigrant families, so I think he should think about what exactly the big issues is[sic].”
According to Ernest Prescott, he didn’t “think there is a national emergency.”
Contrasting many of the other student opinions, senior Political Science major, Chandler Strama, responded believes that there are “a lot of complex point of views [sic] on this issue.”
“The border is definitely not secured, granted, we do have a lot of other emergencies like Flint Michigan that definitely needs a filtered water system,” agreed Strama, “but I call that ‘what-about-ism.’ We can handle issues one at a time, and right now, I think that we should focus on the border just because of all the things that come across the border, especially human trafficking, drugs, that kind of thing.”
“But I do think that declaring a national emergency is a bit scary for the executive branch,” he admitted. “They’re flexing the muscles a little too much. Maybe we need to reel it back in a bit, but the border is a real issue and that’s something I do think we should fix.”
This issue will be continually observed by myself and the USC Aiken student body.
Columns written by editors and writers of Pacer Times reflect the opinion of that writer. Letters to the editor may be emailed to Editor-in-Chief Cecilia Maddox at cmy@usca.edu, and will be published at the editorial staff’s discretion.
