Clinton’s declaration is a case study in presidential powers, which, once activated, chief executives are often reluctant to roll back. The United States has roughly 30 ongoing national emergencies—one of them has been in place for four decades, having been issued by President Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.
That most Americans could live in a “national emergency” for 40 years without noticing says something about the broad—some would say insidious—expansion of emergency powers. The United States has ongoing emergencies for everything from unrest in Burundi to the movement of vessels near Cuba. It’s not that Cuban maritime malfeasance will end in U.S. martial law, or even that Clinton was invoking the same kind of emergency Trump has flirted with to fund his border wall. But the basic legal concept—an emergency allows the president to exercise powers not otherwise granted to him by Congress—is common to all these scenarios. [...]
“States of emergency that last decades are not only a linguistic oxymoron,” Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who serves as a special rapporteur on countering terrorism to the United Nations Human Rights Council, told me. “They function to degrade the rule of law, often consolidate executive powers imperceptibly but distinctly, and more broadly loosen the boundaries between the normal and the exceptional.”
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