The only national emergency is the law that empowers a mad king (Will Bunch, Apr. 6th, 2025, Philadelphia Inquirer)
The sad reality is that we gave him this power.
In the fall of 1976 — ironically, America’s Bicentennial year — Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the White House authority to take strong economic measures against foreign nations without either an investigation or seeking prior approval from Congress. Like a lot of laws passed in the years immediately after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Congress thought that IEEPA was a way to reign in an imperial president, when in reality it did the exact opposite.
The idea behind the law was to end a raft of ongoing emergencies declared by Nixon and other past presidents and create a better-spelled-out, more democratic process for any future ones. Instead, the declaration of national emergencies has expanded under every president, Democrat or Republican, over high-profile events like the 1979 Iran hostage crisis or the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In the bigger picture, Americans have become way too numb to sweeping uses and, arguably, abuses of presidential powers, whether that’s dropping bombs on Yemen with little more debate than an emoji-laden Signal chat, or imposing economic sanctions or, before last Wednesday, more targeted tariffs. This development is completely the opposite of the version of America sought by its founders, who envisioned a republic in which Congress — a large deliberative body, elected by the citizenry — would have the power to declare war or levy taxes, including tariffs. […]
Even some conservatives who were presumably elated over Trump’s victory last November are appalled over his abuse of the emergency law, including the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative legal outfit supported by the likes of industrialist Charles Koch and Supreme Court influencer Leonard Leo. This week, the group filed a complaint against the president’s new tariffs. But this moment should serve as a much bigger wake-up call for how far America has gone down the wrong track.
If Congress wants to listen to the more than 1 million people in the streets — and it should, if it wants to cling to any lingering claim on legitimacy — then it should first act immediately to use the power it has under the 1970s law to reverse the taxation-without-representation of a mad king, as soon as possible. Then it should repeal IEEPA and draft new legislation that severely restricts a president’s emergency-declaration powers, since we’ve now seen how badly these can be misused and abused by a power-hungry dictator.