When everything’s a national emergency, nothing is. While presidents have long invoked national emergencies for situations that no serious people believed were national emergencies, they’ve packaged them in rhetoric and rationale to imply genuine intent. President Trump’s admission that he “didn’t need to do this,” but would “rather do this much faster,” gives the lie to truth of most national emergencies, immolating the political and legal precedent that presidents have positioned national emergencies as actual emergencies.
Now that the veneer’s been wiped off completely, Democrats haven’t responded with the obvious solution of updating the National Emergency Act to constrain the definition of what constitutes a national emergency. Instead, they’ve given us a glimpse inside Pandora’s box and the executive overreach to come.
