Andrew Napolitano joined the Fox & Friends curvy couch Tuesday morning and addressed the current government shutdown over border wall funding, in particular, the reports that President Donald Trump will declare a National Emergency to allocate funding for a controversial border wall.

Fox & Friends is as reliably pro-Trump as any cable news program that exists. So on the day that PresidentTrump plans to address the nation from the Oval Office, Napolitano once again proved to be the Libertarian iconoclast that he is, by pouring cold water on the legality of the Commander in Chief doing an end run around the Constitutional roles of Congressional funding.

Speaking in plain terms, Napolitano said that Trump can “declare a state of emergency, but the declaration itself does not give him the power to take private property,” adding that according to Republican Rep. Will Hurd who represents a border district in Texas, “most of the government the federal government doesn’t own have to condemn it and pay for it can’t do that without congressional authorization.”

He then made clear that the President “can’t spend money without congressional authorization.”

Napolitano then made a plea for a “national debate” on the complex issue of immigration reform, arguing that building a political consensus would actually be a more expedient path to resolving the current immigration issues instead of declaring a National Emergency which would likely be held up in courts for years.

“The president can commence that if he wants tonight.”

Watch above courtesy of Fox News.

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