EMERGENCY LAW REGIME

Patrick A. Thronson*

Unbenownst to most Americans, the United States is presently under thirty

presidentially declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive

Branch, including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organiza-

tion in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastruc-

ture, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without

congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service

personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency

Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures, which confer

powers on the President—such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that

appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the

National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires Congress to vote every six

months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has

done so only once in the nearly forty-year history of the Act.

This Note and an accompanying online compendium attempt, for the first time

since the 1970s, to reach a reasonably complete assessment of the scope and legal

effects of the thirty national emergencies now in effect in the United States. The

Note also proposes specific statutory reforms to rein in the unchecked growth of these

emergencies and political reforms to subject the vast executive powers granted by the

U.S. emergency law regime to the democratic process.

from 2012 https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1055&context=mjlr