The budget standoff between President Trump and Congress has now entered its third week. The House won’t pass a spending bill that gives Trump the $5.6 billion he wants for his wall, or indeed any money for it. Trump won’t sign a bill that doesn’t contain it.

The resulting partial government shutdown is only now reaching the point at which it is starting to hurt, where essential government personnel are working without pay.

Trump is looking for a way around this, and he might have found one. He has announced that he may declare a national emergency and use that as a pretext to build the border wall that he promised and ran on.

Although such a move could solve the shutdown problem (at least for this year), it would do so at the expense of proper constitutional order. Even if this ad hoc solution is plausibly legal, it’s a terrible way to govern and just another sign that Congress has relinquished far too much of its rightful authority to oversee the executive branch.

Trump’s plan would be to declare an emergency at the border and use that emergency to justify spending military construction funds to build a wall.

Emergency governance has become standard practice. As of 2017, there were 28 different active federal national emergencies. Some are real and threatening, but few are imminent. Six date back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, which ended 18 years ago. More than a dozen public health emergencies were then in effect, and in any given year, literally hundreds of public disaster declarations are made, some more meritorious than others.

Such declarations are not always abuses of power, but they are often used merely to create certain advantageous legal situations or to free money for one purpose or another. The Congressional Research Service found in 2007 that emergency powers exist in law allowing the president to “seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

Just looking at that list, it should be clear that such power will inevitably be abused. Even though there are some checks (including judicial review of many "emergency" designations) against the creation of spurious emergencies, presidents have way too much power to act alone.

Even if you support the construction of a border wall, it should concern you that this kind of power will be in the hands of other presidents whose agenda you will not support. Conservatives rightly cried foul when former President Barack Obama claimed his agenda “couldn’t wait” for Congress. What has changed since then?

It’s possible that Trump will find a clever “emergency” method of funding his wall. (It’s also possible that it will be tied up in court until the end of his presidency, but who’s counting?) If it ends up being legal for a president to declare an emergency as an excuse for spending money without approval of Congress, it’s nevertheless a terrible sign that longstanding neglect of our constitutional machinery is degrading the system our founders created.

If lawmakers want to build a wall, they should start by designing a better barrier between congressional and executive powers.