Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt has been disinvited from a local Republican event in his home state next month amid anger over his vote to block President Donald Trump’s use of emergency powers to build a border wall, The Kansas City Star reported on Tuesday.
Blunt, who won re-election in 2016 by three percentage points on Trump’s coattails, was one of 12 GOP senators to join Democrats in opposing the president’ national emergency declaration.
“I am so disappointed in you now that I can hardly speak,” Wanda Martens, a member of the Christian County Republican Central Committee who serves as the local party committee’s event chair, wrote in an email to Blunt’s office, saying she did not want him to show up for the GOP event.
However, Chuck Branch, another central committee member, disagreed with Martens, saying “Taking it to a personal level of not inviting him to a Republican event seems to be crossing a line in my view.”
But Ed Martin, a former Missouri Republican chair who serves as president of the conservative Eagle Forum Education & Legal Defense Fund, insisted the backlash against Blunt is widespread among conservative grassroots activists.
In explaining his vote, Blunt said it was a matter of principle because he also opposed executive overreach during the Obama administration and warned the precedent would allow a future Democratic president to use the National Emergencies Act to enact gun control or strict environmental regulations opposed by Republicans.
Blunt pointed out that no president has ever used the National Emergencies Act “this way, where (you) ask the Congress to do something, go through that whole constitutional process and then, when you don’t get what you ask for that way, just decide, ‘Well, it’s an emergency.’”
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