This what they wanted all along, black people rioting didn’t go as planned
Presidential emergency powers, explained
What are emergency powers?
National emergencies are critical tools for addressing sudden and unforeseen events — often situations that require an immediate, decisive response to address. In our constitutional system, a national emergency declaration allows the president to temporarily use certain authorities that Congress has previously approved. Congress delegated this authority to the president because it sometimes cannot act quickly enough to respond to certain kinds of situations, such as natural disasters and public health emergencies.
Upon declaring a national emergency, over 130 special authorities — such as the authority to shut down communications facilities or draw down equipment from national defense stockpiles— are immediately unlocked that enable a president to intervene in ways that are unavailable to them outside of an emergency declaration.
Given these vast executive powers, national emergencies can also be quite dangerous in a democratic system. If they are not subject to checks and accountability, these powers could be used to bypass congressional action or infringe on constitutional rights. Congress knew that delegating these powers to the executive branch came with risk, which is why it passed the
National Emergencies Act(NEA) in 1976. The act constrained executive overreach by allowing Congress to terminate a national emergency with a majority vote through a simple concurrent resolution, which did not require the president’s signature. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court
declared such “legislative vetoes” unconstitutional in 1983, leaving in its wake a regime that — in the words of one expert — makes emergencies “
easy to declare and hard to stop.”