re: Senate can’t veto Emergency Declaration but which R’s will oppose?

Fair enough. We can agree to disagree.

Personally, I am quite concerned about President Sanders being able to do anything he wants to do in ANY of those 123 areas (I linked them, but here is a summary of the NYU findings), even when the GOP controls both houses of Congress ... simply by uttering the incantation “Emergency.”

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Some of the laws stand out as particularly alarming in what they authorize and in their potential for abuse. One statute, for example, would allow the president to suspend a law that prohibits the testing of chemical and biological weapons on unwitting human subjects. Section 706(c) of the Communications Act of 1934 allows the president to shut down or take over radio stations. If she proclaims a threat of war, she can go further and take over wire communications as well. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) allows the government to freeze any asset or block any financial transaction in which a foreign national has an interest, even if the asset belongs to an American or the transaction is between Americans.

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a few of the statutes have been used frequently, with six having been used more than 10 times. Most notably, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act has been invoked on an almost yearly basis since it was passed in 1977 and is cited in all but three of the emergencies ever declared under the National Emergencies Act. This level of reliance on an emergency power raises a different concern: that the actions being taken are not emergency actions at all, but the implementation of standard policy that should be bound by non-emergency law.

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Although the very concept of “emergency” suggests a temporary, short-term event, states of emergency last a long time, and they’re getting longer. Thirty-one of the 58 states of emergency declared since the National Emergencies Act was passed are still in effect today. The average duration of declared emergencies is 9.6 years. Twenty-five emergencies have lasted 10 years or longer; 13 of these were declared between 2001 and 2008. The longest-lasting emergency, Blocking Iranian Government Property, was first declared in 1979 on the heels of the hostage crisis and has been persistently renewed for 39 years.

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Emergency powers are being used as a pretext to deal with other problems. Presidents Obama and Trump invoked nonexistent economic crises to decrease or eliminate statutory pay increases for federal workers. (While there was arguably an economic crisis at the beginning of Obama’s administration, he continued to invoke this emergency law throughout his two terms.) President Trump invoked the 9/11(/2001) state of emergency in 2017 to fill a chronic shortage in Air Force pilots.

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