Mo Brooks battles CNN host over Trump border wall emergency authority: ‘How many dead people do you have to have, John, before it’s an emergency?’

Friday on CNN’s “New Day,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Huntsville) had a heated exchange with show co-host John Berman over whether or not President Donald Trump had the authority to build a border wall without money earmarked explicitly by Congress.

Brooks argued U.S. Code gave Trump the authority to begin wall construction and accused Berman of “misleading the public” on the issue.

Berman questioned the potential use of the categorization of “emergency,” to which Brooks offered statistics of U.S. casualties that could be a result of a U.S.-Mexican porous border.


“What’s the emergency?” Berman said.

“With the southern border, we have the loss of at least 15,000 Americans a year. You have 2,000 that are homicides by illegal aliens, according to federal government data. You’ve got another 15,000, 16,000 that die each year from heroin overdoses, 90 percent of which comes across our porous southern border. That’s not counting the 55,000 additional deaths that are caused by overdoses, a significant amount of which comes across the southern border,” Brooks stated. “So, how many dead people do you have to have, John, before you’ll consider it an emergency?”

@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV and host of “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN in Huntsville.

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