Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross

President Trump recently declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. and suggested it could be extended to large cities across the country whose efforts to stop crime do not meet with his personal approval. In doing so, he is making use of America’s long and sordid history of abuse of the Constitution’s requirements for implementing such powers.

The Constitution says, “He [the President] may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses.” This is taken to mean situations requiring immediate government action, such as emergencies or crises. (Article II, Section 3) Woodrow Wilson abused this provision soon after his election by calling Congress into special session to hear his plan for tariffs, as though that were an emergency requiring immediate attention, which it clearly was not. Today, of course, Trump has fully usurped Congress’ legal power to enact tariff measures as well as the requirement to call special sessions for emergencies by using instead an endless series of executive orders, press releases and posts on social media to enact tariff policy.

America’s earliest precedent for the faulty use of emergency presidential power was George Washington. A federal tax on whiskey boiled over into a “rebellion” in Pennsylvania. The Constitution specifies that federal troops can be used to intervene in a state only when requested by the governor. Pennsylvania’s governor insisted he could handle the matter locally, but Washington instead raised a militia army of 12,950 and made a big show of marching to western Pennsylvania. He could only find and arrest 20 suspected rebels, only two of which were ever convicted.

Lincoln created the emergency he wanted to use by provoking South Carolina to fire the first shot in the Civil War while Congress was out of town. Lincoln was thus “forced” to run the government and engage in war on his own without obtaining Congress’ emergency approval. He finally called them back into session after four months, when the war was well along in progress.

Eight months after the armistice ending World War I, Wilson was still running railroads, and telephone and telegraph companies under an ongoing emergency power. Congress begged him to return the private sector to its rightful stewards, but Wilson refused.

Franklin Roosevelt got major grants of emergency power from Congress to deal with the Depression after calling an emergency session of Congress in March 1933. FDR declared 39 emergencies in his first six years in office, all during peacetime. One Congressman quipped, “Any national administration is entitled to one or two national emergencies in a term of six years. But an emergency every six weeks means plain bad management.”

Harry Truman extended the wartime emergency power of FDR well beyond wartime when in October 1945, he seized 26 oil companies on national security grounds when they threatened to go on strike. When the auto and steel industries were having labor disputes and shutdowns, he determined to enter the fray. He wrote in a journal, “Declare an emergency, call out troops. Start industry and put anyone to work who wants to work. If any leader interferes, court martial him. Adjourn Congress and run the country.”

Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” and the people pretty much accepted this as the same as an actual war. Johnson used emergency war-time housing regulations in peacetime by failing to rescind the earlier emergency. Johnson used the popular minister Billy Graham to advise him as to God’s will, suggesting that if God wanted it, it must be an emergency.

Nixon declared a state of emergency when the nation’s postal workers went on strike and used the U.S army to force workers back on the job. In 1971, Congress discovered that the U.S. had been in a continuous state of national emergency since 1933 starting with Roosevelt’s banking emergency. A measure controlling the expiration of national emergencies was finally enacted in 1976 but has fallen into disuse as later presidents have ignored it and enacted emergencies by Presidential fiat.

Today, President Trump essentially has declared an emergency for a domestic war against half of the electorate that will not be lifted until he has established the 1% class in permanent power under his leadership. He is finding emergency conditions in Democrat-run cities, and among African American citizens, brown-skinned immigrants, people who failed to vote for him and folks who don’t like his policies. Where is Billy Graham now when we need him?