Pelosi tosses Trump's national emergency threat back in his face: A Dem president could declare an emergency too

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered a warning to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party: declaring a national emergency over the border would only empower a Democratic president to do the same to accomplish their own pet goals.

"It's important to note that when the president declares this emergency, first of all, it's not an emergency, what's happening at the border. It's a humanitarian challenge to us," she said. "The president has tried to sell a bill of goods to America."

Pelosi said that Trump was "doing an end run" around Congress's duly appointed power of the purse, as well as their oversight responsibility, and warned the Republicans that the president's gambit may get him closer to his short term goals, but would have lasting consequences for their party when it inevitably blew up in their faces.

"I know the Republicans have some unease about it, no matter what they say," Pelosi said. "If the president can declare an emergency on something that he has created as an emergency, an illusion that he wants to convey, just think of what a president with different values can present to the American people."

By way of example, the Speaker brought up perhaps the one issue that terrifies Republicans the most: that some day, the U.S. government would designate "the epidemic of gun violence in America" an emergency and come for their guns.

"A Democratic president can declare emergencies, as well," she said with a stiff grin. "So the precedent that the president is setting here is something that should be met with great unease and dismay by the Republicans."

Watch the video below.