ABSTRACT
Consideration of the presidency and emergency powers has been deferred until this point because it involves the functioning of the office under abnormal circumstances; however, the occurrence of emergencies has not been so rare as to render emergency powers a topic too exotic for consideration. On the contrary, over the course of the last seventy years or so, many Americans have lived a good part of their lives under national emergencies of one kind or another. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to declare a national emergency in 1917 when he prohibited American ship owners from selling boats to foreigners on grounds that they were essential to the war effort. President Franklin Roosevelt declared a state of emergency in 1933 to forestall the collapse of the American banking system. In 1939, he announced a “limited” national emergency in the wake of the outbreak of war in Europe and an “unlimited” one in 1941 as the Nazi threat grew more imminent. President Harry Truman put the nation on an emergency footing in 1950 after America’s entry into the Korean War. Thereafter, no national emergencies were declared until the country was well into the first term of the Nixon administration, when President Richard Nixon made two emergency proclamations, one in March 1970 as a result of the halt in the postal service and the other in August 1971 in response to the dangerously high deficit in the United States balance of payments. A number of national emergencies have been declared subsequently, but these have been very narrowly defined and usually related to an issue of foreign policy. President Bill Clinton, for example, made five national emergency declarations during his first term alone, such as preventing U.S. companies from any involvement with the petroleum industry in Iran (1995), ordering the release of food grain from the U.S. disaster reserve to assist farmers in the Southwest (1996); and restricting movement and anchorage of U.S. vessels in Cuban territorial waters (1996). The major national emergency declaration of the George W. Bush presidency came three days after the 9/11 attack. It was
renewed by him each subsequent year he was in office and by President Barack Obama as well.
