Trump’s abuse of emergency powers is the real national emergency  

President Trump is turning exceptions into rules, treating “national emergencies” as routine tools of governance. 

Last week, he declared long wait times at airports a national emergency and directed the Department of Homeland Security to find the funds to pay TSA officers while Congress dithers on funding.

Few Americans object to paying these government employees or shortening lines in airports. But by relying on spurious national emergencies, Trump is evading legal constraints and undermining the Constitution’s separation of powers. 

Since returning to office, he has declared 10 national emergencies and a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C. His two-term total, 23, far exceeds his predecessors. He has used them to carry out hundreds of actions that ordinarily require congressional approval or regulatory review.

Declaring an emergency unlocks more than 130 statutory authorities. As the Brennan Center for Justice has observed, many of them “seem like the stuff of authoritarian regimes: giving the president the power to take over domestic communications, seize Americans’ bank accounts, and deploy U.S. troops to any foreign country.”

The 1976 National Emergencies Act was born out of concerns about expanding presidential powers. A Senate Special Committee, whose work led to adoption of the act, warned that at “the height of a crisis,” a president’s emergency powers “appear to be virtually unlimited.” The committee cited as “sound guidance” Justice Robert Jackson’s concurring opinion in a case that declared President Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills unconstitutional. The founders, Jackson presciently wrote, knew that emergencies “afford a ready pretext for usurpation,” and suspected “that emergency powers would tend to kindle........

© The Hill