Republics and Dictators

ArticleVBlog ^ | April 1st 2019 | Rodney Dodsworth

[Jacquerie]

Subtitle: American Dictator. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 is a hand grenade on our Constitutional shelf. Any President can pull the pin. The spark for this squib is the national emergency declaration by President Trump over the southern border crisis. Since the media focus is, as always, on politics, they devote little attention to the bigger picture of the proper place of republican chief executives.

In times of crisis, republics exercise despotic powers, meaning those unauthorized by their constitutions. Laws passed in, and justified by, pressing times too often remain after the return of peace.¹ During war, some Natural Law and Constitutional limitations go by the wayside as citizens find themselves, for instance, in involuntary servitude as military draftees. Similarly, property is at risk when government commandeers industries. Although it must be this way when wars of survival jeopardize the unalienable rights and lives of one and all, the solution isn’t to sully the Constitution. Instead, the proper approach is to temporarily and Constitutionally step outside the civil boundaries of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, our government also found justification for emergency, extra-Constitutional responses to problems outside of wars. I suppose the National Emergencies Act is emblematic of the hundred-year erosion of Congressional authority and pride as it slips ever-more significant Article I powers to the courts and executive branch. I am uncomfortable with extended Presidential authority to both 1.) declare an emergency and 2.) command the community and military to deal with the emergency.²

The question in republics shouldn’t be as much the “what” of extraordinary powers, of what to do, but rather the “who” to entrust with the determination that a crisis exists and execution of the enormous powers necessary to save the nation. This problem, of how to allot executive authority during national emergencies, isn’t new.

[rawcatslyentist]

Laws passed in, and justified by, pressing times too often remain after the return of peace

There was a telephone tax funding the Spanish American war that only in the past decade or so was finally repealed.

[Nateman]

I was curious as to why Government shutdown's only go back a few decades. The answer is President's use to routinely submit emergency budgets to keep the beast moving. Congress took back that power eventually.

[wastedyears]

Thank God killary isn’t president. We’d be in reeducation camps.

[Jacquerie]

Add income tax withholding to the list.

[otness_e]

For what it’s worth, trying to reinforce the border from “refugees” who come closer in definition to invaders is a genuinely constitutional use of extraordinary powers, certainly far more so than trying to force in allowances for people to choose which gendered bathroom they can use. Obama’s usage was closer to a dictator if we go by definitions.

[wastoute]

So we can make it Constitutional if we declare war on Mexico?