Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Wednesday questioned the constitutionality of President Trump declaring a national emergency at the southern border as a way to build his promised wall.

Trump is rumored to want to use the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to push forward with the construction of a physical barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border. The law would allow him to use military funding to undertake the project, despite Democratic opposition to the wall that has led to a 19-day partial government shutdown over funding.

“I think that would be a very dubious move from a constitutional perspective,” Collins told “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.” “Without congressional authorization is not what I think is intended by the National Emergency Act.”

Trump has demanded more than $5 billion to build a border impediment. The president tweeted Wednesday that he had walked out of a “total waste of time” White House meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after the pair refused to meet his request.

“It makes me very worried about whether we’re going to be able to get to a compromise this week,” Collins told NBC News. “I’m worried about what the end game is. This cannot be allowed to go on forever.”

Collins suggested earlier this week the Senate vote on two bills passed by the House that could re-open the government. The measures would fund several affected departments and agencies through Sept. 30 and the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8. The latter piece of legislation provides only $1.3 billion for border security that cannot be used for a wall.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has repeatedly said she will retire when she is no longer able to work “full steam” — a promise that could be put to the test this week — or soon after — with the 85-year-old justice sitting out oral arguments while recovering from cancer surgery.

Ginsburg’s absence for the past three days and recent health issues have fueled speculation about her future on the high court. If Ginsburg steps down as one of the four liberal justices currently serving, President Trump will almost certainly appoint a conservative replacement, tilting the court further to the Right.

If Ginsburg is serious about her repeated vow to step down if she is not fully robust, liberals could be facing a crisis in the judiciary sooner than they think. Widely viewed as tenaciously willing to hang on with a Republican in the presidency, Ginsburg’s own affirmations suggest she may view competency to conduct the court’s business as a matter that rivals the court’s ideological makeup in importance.

Although Ginsburg said last summer that she hopes to serve until she is 90, she has been consistent about when it will be time for her to hang up the robe: “I said I will do this job as long as I can do it full steam,” she said on Dec. 17 at the New York City premier of “On the Basis of Sex,” a movie based on her early career. Five days later, Ginsburg underwent surgery to remove early-stage cancerous nodules and was hospitalized for several days.

Last February, Ginsburg used the same phrase during an event at the Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. “As long as I can do the job full steam, I will be here,” she said.

“I will retire when it’s time,” Ginsburg told NPR’s Nina Totenberg in 2016. “And when is it time? When I can’t do the job full steam.” She used the same “full steam” phrase on at least two other occasions.

Ginsburg has faced multiple recent health issues, including cancer surgery last month and a fall in November that resulted in three fractured ribs. She previously survived two forms of cancer in 1999 and 2009, as well as heart surgery in 2014.

Despite these health challenges, Ginsburg had never missed a high court argument in her 25 years on the bench until this week. The justice, known affectionately to admirers as the “Notorious RBG,” was absent from oral arguments, and Chief Justice John Roberts said she would be participating in the case “on the basis of the written briefs and the oral argument transcript.” A court spokesperson did not respond to an inquiry about Ginsburg’s recovery status, and has given no indication of when she will return.

Although it is not unprecedented for a justice to miss arguments, it is rare. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist missed oral arguments in a reported 44 cases in 2004 while recovering from cancer surgery. He passed away in 2005.

Ginsburg said last July that she hoped to stay on the Supreme Court until age 90, following the path of her former colleague Justice John Paul Stevens. Last year Ginsburg also hired law clerks through 2020, indicating that she had no plans to step down before then.

December saw the most families caught at the U.S.-Mexico border ever, with nearly 32,000 family members apprehended.

According to Department of Homeland Security data released Wednesday, 31,901 of the 60,782 migrants from Central America who were apprehended by Border Patrol agents stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border or turned away by Customs and Border Protection officers at official crossing points were families.

That is the highest number of families to ever attempt migrating, both legally and illegally, into the U.S. in one month, according to federal data.

Nearly 90 percent of all families – 27,518 – entered in rural or suburban areas between dozens of ports of entry on the southern border.

It’s the third month the number of family members exceeded the number of single adults, which was under 24,000.

50,753 people were arrested for trespassing from Mexico in December. It marks the third month in a row that more than 50,000 people have illegally crossed into to the U.S. Another 10,000 people who tried to enter through ports were told they lacked the documents to do so.

Illegal immigration apprehensions at the southern border have skyrocketed since Trump’s first few months in office, when 15,000 to 20,000 people were reported being apprehended per month.

One of the reasons for the increase is the change in demographics of those entering. Caravans of people fleeing violence, unemployment, and crime in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have allowed families to migrate north without having to pay the average $8,000 fee for smugglers to get them through Mexico.

Since early fall, Border Patrol has seen Mexican smugglers lead groups of 100 to 300 people over the border. Historically, groups of five to 10 people would be escorted over the border by a smuggler.

The dramatic increase in group size and their arrival in rural parts of Arizona and New Mexico has presented a major challenge for Border Patrol, which is responsible for arresting people who have illegally entered.

In December, two young children traveling from Guatemala died after having entered New Mexico as members of large groups. The deaths marked the first in a decade, prompting Democrats to launch investigations into the incidents.

During the last week of December, CBP began referring hundreds of migrants taken into custody in these rural parts of the southe rn border to medical professionals. More than 450 migrants were referred to medical professionals for care over a nine-day period.

President Trump has maintained that he didn’t collude with Russia during his 2016 bid for the White House. New information, inadvertently released in an improperly redacted court filing on Tuesday, makes clear that his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, probably did.

That puts Trump, who had previously defended Manafort and even considered pardoning him, in a tight spot with only one real option: distancing himself from his former ally and pleading innocence to Manafort’s shady dealings abroad.

Under the blacked-out portions of Tuesday’s filings, Manafort’s defense team acknowledges that he shared 2016 presidential polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, identified by the FBI as having ties to Russian intelligence. Another portion of the filing reveals that, while serving on the Trump campaign, Manafort also discussed a Russian-backed Ukrainian “peace plan” with the same individual on “several occasions.”

Put simply, Trump’s campaign manager indisputably shared sensitive data with an operative with links to a hostile foreign power’s intelligence agency. That information, shared personally by Manafort, seems likely to have included at least some internal data, not otherwise available, that would be potentially useful in Russian influence and misinformation campaigns or other intelligence priorities.

Needless to say, an American campaign official handing over election information — and as emails reported by the Washington Post show, offering private briefings — to Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, a billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin and Kilimnik, is a red flag of collaboration or, in other words, collusion.

As for the Ukrainian peace plan, there were few details on what exactly the proposed deal entailed, but it seems likely that it might have been some version of a Russian plan that would legally cede Crimea, a part of Ukraine illegally seized by Moscow, to Russia.

That too is concerning. Currently, the U.S. enforces sanctions on Russia for its actions in Crimea as a violation of Ukrainian sovereignty and international law. Changing that policy and advocating for an agreement that would literally hand over the territory to Russia is tantamount to selling out Ukraine and helping Moscow bully its way to territorial claims.

These revelations solidify Manafort’s reputation as a deceptive player in the dark world of Russian politics where he made his money working for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies. He was convicted on charges relating to those dealings and specifically his work for pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine, of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account in October 2017.

So far, none of that nastiness of selling out to Russia for a little cash directly touches Trump’s actions. He should keep it that way.

To prevent dragging himself down with his one-time campaign manager, Trump would do well to keep his mouth shut on the latest release and make clear that Manafort’s collaboration with Russia was unacceptable. He should also keep anything even remotely related to Manafort and his contacts as far from the Oval Office as possible.

And Trump should stick to that strategy even if it means trading his signature argument of “No Collusion” to “Not Me.”

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Soon we will find out how Iowa feels.

Rep. Steve King will face a primary challenger come 2020. State Sen. Randy Feenstra announced Wednesday that he will challenge the incumbent Republican.

King came to Capitol Hill in 2003 and has been a loser ever since. This is of his own doing. The congressman has become a political pariah because of his bad habit of palling around with the European far-right and his nativist preferences. Democrats have pointed to these positions for years. Republicans have recently caught on.

In October Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, condemned King for his “white supremacy and hate.” And before the 2018 reelection, the NRCC cut off all financial aid to the congressman, a surprising development only in so far that it didn’t happen sooner.

King can best be known by the company he keeps. He has supported Marine Le Pen, the French politician who compares Muslims to Nazis, and he has backed Viktor Orban, the Hungarian autocrat who has strangled everything from the courts to the media to maintain his grasp on power. More recently, King decided it was a good idea to endorse an alt-right candidate for Toronto mayor named Faith Goldy.

The congressman doesn’t do this in secret. He does it right out in the open — like the time he used a trip to Europe financed by a Holocaust memorial group to sit down for an interview with a neo-Nazi publication. White Europeans, he lamented, were being replaced by immigrants and, he concluded, “Western civilization is on the decline.”

King doesn’t behave much better stateside. For every child of illegal immigrants “who is a valedictorian,” he once said, “there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Cutting to the chase during the midterms, King simply wrote off Mexican immigrants as “dirt.”

These aren’t just the comments of just another politically incorrect politician. They are the ugly distractions that keep King from doing anything productive in Congress. As Philip Klein argues, it isn’t just enough for conservatives to fight or to annoy the Left. They need to actually win. Hence the line of attack from Feenstra.

“The President needs effective conservative leaders in Congress who will not only support his agenda, but actually get things done,” Feenstra argues in his announcement. He adds “we don’t need any more sideshows or distractions, we need to start winning for Iowa’s families.”

Iowa has a number of corn-fed conservative brawlers in Congress. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh owe their seats on the Supreme Court in large part to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. That senator has focused on political fights with consequences. The state would be better served if they replaced King with someone similar.

When it comes to North Korea’s amenability to a durable agreement with the United States, Chinese influence on Pyongyang is crucial. But while Chinese President Xi Jinping thinks that this influence gives him leverage over the U.S., the opposite is actually true. China now needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China. And if China fails to deliver on North Korea, the U.S. can greatly damage Chinese interests.

All of this bears note, considering North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s meetings with Xi in Beijing this week. Hoping to exchange viewpoints beyond U.S. intelligence detection, the Xi-Kim meetings precede a second summit between President Trump and Kim. That summit will likely occur by the end of March and is of instrumental importance. After all, Kim’s recent behavior indicates an intent to resume missile tests if a new summit does not lead to near-term international sanctions relief. The Trump administration is also growing impatient with Kim’s unwillingness to allow inspector access to his nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. The simple point here is that one side will have to move the diplomatic needle constructively, but neither side seems interested in doing so. The ingredients for a renewed crisis are coming together.

Xi knows all of this. The immensely powerful Chinese leader is also aware of American aggravation over Beijing’s breach of sanctions targeting Pyongyang. But Xi wrongly thinks that this gives him leverage over the U.S. The opposite is actually true.

Kim’s visit to Beijing proves as much. While Kim has been afforded heavy diplomatic prestige by Beijing, there is no question that Xi is the boss. It is only Xi who offers that which Kim most needs: steady resources and a diplomatic outlet. So, unless and until North Korea enters international trading structures, Kim must accept Xi’s direction, lest North Korea suffer an economic catastrophe that could lead to a coup or regime collapse. Moreover, seeing as Xi’s ultimate ambition is a new international order in which China grants patronage in return for absolute deference, he could ultimately cut off North Korea to send a message to other nations.

Ironically, here, it is Trump’s grand bargain that offers Kim mastery of his own destiny. At present, however, Kim must pay great heed to that which Xi directs. So, if Kim does not engage in significant confidence-building steps with the U.S. in the next few weeks, we can safely assume that Xi has given Kim his permission to keep playing games. But that invites another question: Why would Xi allow Kim’s negative action while China needs an economic deal from the U.S.?

The answer is simple: because Xi is comfortable taking risks in return for rewards. His ideal outcome to the North Korean nuclear crisis is one in which Pyongyang deploys its nuclear forces but also offers some kind of security guarantee that Trump accepts. That outcome would enable Xi to continue dangling his control over North Korea as a means of exerting concessions from the U.S., but with reduced risk of U.S. military action of the kind Trump threatened in 2017.

That outcome would also be a disaster for the U.S., keeping Kim in check only via Beijing’s expensive generosity or via military action that risks a nuclear exchange. To avoid that outcome but resolve this crisis diplomatically, Trump must challenge Xi at his own game. Trump should make clear to Xi that absent significant near-term North Korean concessions, he will hold Xi and Kim equally responsible. Trump should clarify that this will mean no U.S. trade deal with China (which Xi desperately needs in light of China’s economic weakening) and new sanctions on the Chinese financial sector.

Ultimately, though, America’s better interest here requires Trump to introduce Xi to one of the Chinese president’s favorite ideals: re-education. Xi must be helped to understand that his influence over Kim does not amount to leverage but to greater Chinese responsibility for the outcome. If Xi chooses to ignore that lesson, he must be made to face a painful economic and diplomatic detention.