Morning Joe: What If Barack Obama Declared A National Emergency?

Joe Scarborough wants to know how Republicans would have reacted if President Barack Obama had declared a national emergency and started seizing private property. The Morning Joe host called out GOP hypocrisy on executive overreach by contrasting President Donald Trump’s impending national emergency to Obama’s executive order on immigration.

Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski showed a clip of Vice President Mike Pence criticizing Obama’s executive order, which extended legal status to millions of undocumented migrants. They contrasted that with Pence’s current support for an even more expansive measure from Trump.

“Wow. A lot happens. Things happen. You forget stuff. Does Vice President Mike Pence forget that he says that?” Brzezinski asked. “Does he forget that’s what he believed? Does he forget that that was him talking about leadership?”

“By the way, things that he’s believed his entire life have been thrown away because of Donald Trump,” Scarborough said. “Things that conservatives have believed their entire lives — I have to say, it is cute watching so-called conservatives who are actually just in this personality cult of Donald Trump’s, people lecturing me about not being a conservative when actually I believe the same thing I believed 25 years ago, while a lot of these bloggers were having their diapers changed by their mothers and fathers. But it’s not conservative. The party has completely changed what they stand for.”

“I guess we have to play that game, what if Barack Obama?” Scarborough said to guest Bret Stephens. “This week’s question for you, as our special guest star and our audience, is this: What if instead of just signing an executive order, what if Barack Obama declared a national emergency on an issue that was actually at a better place than it had been in half a century but used that national emergency to seize private property from Texas ranchers, Texas farmers, Texas families and Texas small property — small business owners? What in the world do you think that Mike Pence would say shaking his head at the Republican Governors Association?”

“Joe, this is a game I play all the time,” Stephens said. “What if Barack Obama had gone to Kim Jong Un hat in hand, then declared at the State of the Union that peace had been achieved? What if Barack Obama had seized the notes of his translator following his secret meetings with Vladimir Putin?”

“The number of heads exploding at the Heritage Foundation, other conservative think thanks, would have been almost in megaton range in terms of the quantity of explosion here,” Stephens said.

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.