Trump’s declaration of emergencies ‘to expand his power’

Legal scholars say the president’s actions such as imposing tariffs and sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and migrants to El Salvador aren’t authorized by the laws he’s cited and are motivated by a different goal, according to a New York Times analysis.

“He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution and destroy civil liberties,” says Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School who represents a wine importer and other businesses challenging some of Trump’s tariffs.

Trump says that events and circumstances largely considered routine are emergencies that allow him to invoke powers rarely sought by his predecessors but embedded in statutes by lawmakers who wanted to ensure presidents could act quickly and aggressively to confront authentic crises, the Times says.

Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, says the laws Trump has invoked were premised on a presumption that the flexibility they granted wouldn’t be abused.

“Genuine emergencies do occur, and Congress knows that it’s slow,” Bowman says. “It wants presidents acting in good faith to move with rapidity.”

But Bowman says Trump’s approach is different. “Declaring everything an emergency begins to move us in the direction of allowing the use of government force and violence against people you don’t like,” he says.

Lower courts have, for the most part, rejected Trump’s assertions of emergency powers, the Times notes.

The Supreme Court’s most significant ruling on a president’s emergency powers came in its 1952 decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer, says the Times. The court rejected President Truman’s claim that a national emergency — the Korean War — allowed him to nationalize steel mills in the face of labor strikes.

“The decision included a canonical concurrence from Justice Robert H. Jackson, a touchstone that Supreme Court nominees routinely praise at their confirmation hearings,” the Times says.

Jackson wrote that the framers of the Constitution were wary of granting the president emergency powers: “They knew what emergencies were, knew the pressures they engender for authoritative action, knew, too, how they afford a ready pretext for usurpation. We may also suspect that they suspected that emergency powers would tend to kindle emergencies.”