Attorney Alan Dershowitz thinks President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration was a "mistake," he admitted in a new interview.
"There will be a lawsuit. No doubt about it. It will be tied up in the courts for a long time," Dershowitz said on Sunday's "The Cats Roundtable" radio radio show, hosted by billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis.
"My own view is that it was a mistake to do it. I think emergencies are things that happened suddenly. The problems with immigration are long-term."
Trump declared the emergency on Friday in order to secure more funding to build a border barrier between the United States and Mexico. Lawmakers struck a deal to stave off a government shutdown by allocating $1.375 billion for the barrier, far less than the $5.7 billion Trump requested.
Trump's emergency order resulted in roughly $6 billion from the Pentagon's budget and $600 million from the Treasury Department being shifted over to use for the border barrier, Bloomberg reported. Dershowitz said the executive order flies in the face of the Constitution.
"The Constitution requires that all spending bills originate in the House of Representatives. This is a way of circumventing that provision of the Constitution," he said.