The four-star Air Force general who is charged with protecting the American homeland told Congress Tuesday that civilians attempting to cross the southern border illegally do not constitute a military threat, while evading questions about whether he recommended President Trump declare a national emergency to use military construction money to fund new border barriers.
“It is not a military threat,” said Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, “but that’s slightly different than the answer of whether military should be responding to the situation.”
Pressed by Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, about whether a border wall is an effective defense against a military attack, O’Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command, said border security is national security.
“I do see that any barrier in place to secure our nation does have some ramifications to our ability to defend against a military threat as well,” he said, while adding, “Right now, there’s not a specific military force from the south that we are trying to take action against.”
Under questioning from Democrats on the committee, O’Shaughnessy would not say if he believed the president’s Feb. 15 declaration of a national emergency was justified or if he was directly consulted.
“I did not recommend either way,” O’Shaughnessy said, stressing that he has had “multiple conversations” with President Trump about the border, that he had provided “his best military advice,” and that he was “comfortable” that his perspective was considered as the decision was made.
“You’re saying in effect that there’s a national emergency because the president has said there’s a national emergency,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
“No, sir, what I’m saying is from my perspective I get my orders from the secretary of defense and the president, and those orders are very clear to me,” responded O’Shaughnessy.
Republicans came to the president’s defense, including Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who cited more than 70,000 overdose deaths from drugs brought across the southern border, 90 percent from Mexico, as justification enough to declare a national emergency.
“So if that’s not an emergency, 72,000 dead Americans killed by opioids and heroin in one year, I have no fricking idea what an emergency is,” Sullivan said.
But Democrats warned that the president was opening the door to others using non-military emergencies to raid the Pentagon’s military construction budget to fund pet projects.
“Forty thousand people died in 2017 by gun violence in the United States, murders and suicides, that would seem to me to be an emergency,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va.
“So the question that Congress and the Senate is going to grapple with in the next couple of weeks is: Will we allow a president to declare that drug overdose deaths are an emergency, but the threat isn’t military and still will take $6 billion out of the defense budget to deal with it?” Kaine said.
“Because if we set that precedent, I could certainly foresee a day when a president is going to say: 40,000 gun deaths a year are an emergency, and why don’t we take the money out of the Pentagon budget to deal with that?”
