What Is Your Emergency?

Our Congress is preparing to vote on a resolution blocking President Trump's state of emergency declaration with regards to our nation's southern border. Several representatives and senators don't believe illegal immigration is a problem at all, several more do believe it's a problem but don't believe that the president's demand for a wall is the way to solve it. Still more accept those two ideas but don't believe the president needs a national declaration of emergency to get funding for his wall, or they may believe that this issue is important but doesn't get to the "emergency" level.

And of course there are people who would slap the cookie out of a child's hand if they learned the president once smiled at a person who built the plant where it was produced.

Amongst the rhetoric from those supporting this resolution are a good many statements citing the proper separation of powers as outlined in the Constitution. It's Congress' job, we're told, to pass legislation that pretends to funds what the government does. If the president objects, he may veto the legislation. But he's not entitled to just sign the pretend funding legislation and then declare an emergency to shift the money around the way he wants. That power's not in the Constitution, so unless some body of boneheads somewhere changed things around to give him that authority, well, he can't just seize it for himself.

Appearing as the "body of boneheads" in this episode will be the 94th Congress, who in 1976 passed HR 3884 (introduced by New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino) on a 388-5 vote. HR 3884 became the "National Emergencies Act" when it passed the Senate without a roll call vote and was signed by President Gerald Ford. The act delegates 136 distinct statutory authorities to the president; 123 of them can simply be invoked by the president without Congressional input and they can only try to stop them afterwards.

As this column at The Week points out, 31 of the 59 national emergencies declared since the act's passage are still in effect. The other 28 were declared taken care of by the president himself -- not one was revoked by an act of Congress. It's entirely possible that this particular emergency should be revoked, based on any number of reasons that sound good to me. But the idea that the current congressional leadership has suddenly developed an appetite for its congressional duty of crafting, debating and passing legislation for which senators and representatives may be held accountable by their constituents is, as the column notes, ridiculous.

This isn't a new problem, as James Q. Wilson's 1987 article from The Public Interest describes. Even without a Lexis-Nexis search, I can bet I'd find exactly zero complaints from these new stalwart defenders of congressional prerogatives about the 13 emergency declarations during then-President Obama's two terms. There are days when I wonder which is worse -- that these twerps expect people to believe what they say or that they don't.