believe. yes. do you think you re going to get it? is it lamar alexander? do you think this passes? i think we will get the votes to pass this override of the emergency resolution. as you say, we need one more and there are lots of republican senators who at least previously had said they would strongly oppose this. look, we were just talking about authoritarian tendencies, right? this is the president of the united states taking unconstitutional means, declaring an emergency to override an appropriations budget that was passed through the lawful process by republicans and democrats alike. so this is the opposite of what republicans say they stand for, separation of powers, article i. and yet president trump has been very clear, he reiterated it again last night on fox news, he said, look, he s going to veto, this could be the first veto that he signs. do you have enough votes to override that veto? do you even think you can come close to overriding it?
war powers in the congress are reserved to congress in article i. we don t have to play mother may i and ask permission to the administration to fulfill our constitutional duty. senator flake and i have a bipartisan proposal that says after 16 years of open-ended war all across the globe, and americans were surprised when they read the news about four green berets in niger, about news recently that a green beret was killed, potentially strangled by other colleagues in mali. the footprint in africa is much bigger than the american public understands. i introduced documents at the hearing yesterday to demonstrate that. it s time to have the discussion. good news is that i m gratified that the chair, bob corker, is saying you re right. now is the time. we need to move on a mark-up and it should be bipartisan. secretary of state rex
agreement that the united states and russia were party to, for removal of chemical weapons, furtherance of a treaty that they signed, in international law that says you cannot use chemical weapons. there is no legal justification of this. from a moral standpoint, absolutely, i agree with senator rubio, it was the right thing to do. president trump s doing this, finally waking up to the atrocities in syria is a good thing but he should not have done this without coming to congress. let s talk more about this. avery freeman, law professor in cleveland and richard herman, clinical professor joining us from vegas. you will not see him but hear him. avry, you first. president trump s decision to launch missiles against the assad regime without congressional approval legal or not? well, it wasn t legal. but here is the question. here is the analysis. the legal analysis not political. you look at article i.
because it s the right thing. but they re scared to do it. and they know that once you start being specific about these cuts, they re going to be unpopular. that s why i say now s the time. this is their thing. now s the time. what matters is spending cuts. no, it s not, because they didn t do it. what are they? the white house has got to name them first. let s look at the unhappy facts. i was talking to somebody yesterday on the air about the fact that the constitution says, congress has the checkbook. the house of representatives specifically has the checkbook. it s in article i. so since republicans in the house of representatives have had the checkbook in 2000, what s happened? well, we had $155 billion surplus in 2001. now we re $1.5 trillion in debt. we ve been running trillion-dollar deficits for the past four years. yes, nancy pelosi was speaker from 2007 to the beginning of 2011, but republicans have been in charge year after year after year after year with $1 trillion