Emergency Powers

            In constitutional law class today* I argued against granting the president emergency powers at all, generally because emergency powers are too broad, too subject to abuse – as Justice Jackson said, “emergency powers . . . tend to kindle emergencies.”

            This was part of a discussion that rose out of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube case, in which Truman tried to seize control of a steel company that was under a strike during the Korean War. He claimed this was an emergency, since loss of steel production during time of war was a threat to national security and would deprive the armed forces of necessary matérial to carry out their mission.

            While everyone in class was in general agreement that many “emergencies” declared by presidents are not, in fact, emergencies and are just politics under another name, some seemed worried that not permitting some grant of emergency power to the president would leave the country vulnerable when an actual emergency occurred.

            My question is, what sort of emergency could happen that could not wait for Congress to quickly convene and pass some sort of statutory authority for the president to act? The September 11 attacks came up a lot,** and Congress acted quickly then, in fact probably too quickly, because their grant of authority led to the Iraq War.

            An act by another global power indicating total war might count. Global thermonuclear conflict certainly would count. But to my thinking, that is about it.

            The founders may have been more a-feared of Congress overstepping its constitutional boundaries, but 200+ years on we have to fear the overstepping (goose-stepping?) executive as much or more. As Sarah Kendzior says, we don’t have an administration, we have an international crime syndicate. We have Nazis.

            We cannot give these bastards any more power – taking away what they already have is going to be hard enough.

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* Hey! I’m in law school!

** It occurs to me that many of my classmates were probably on 4-5 years old at the time, if that. They have always lived in the time of the war on terror, and I wonder how that shapes their feelings about safety and government power.