Building Hostility

US-Mexican border-crossing apprehensions hit a 46-year low in 2017, but the American President is using his emergency powers to divert funds for his border wall project.

- Paul Thomas

What sort of democracy gifts its already powerful leader emergency powers without defining what constitutes an emergency? But that’s what the United States did with the 1976 National Emergencies Act, which gives the president the power to declare an emergency at the drop of a hat without defining the term or setting out criteria that have to be met for that power to be invoked.

A classic example of the law of unintended consequences, the Act was conceived as a means of reining in a president’s authoritarian impulses. As the Watergate scandal unfolded in 1973-74, there were concerns that President Richard Nixon might resort to arbitrary measures as investigators zeroed in on him and his inner circle. The “Saturday Night Massacre” – the name given to a series of events on October 20, 1973, that came about after Nixon ordered the sacking of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, thereby triggering the resignations of the Attorney-General and his deputy – showed such concerns were well founded.

In practice, the Act had the effect of formalising the president’s power to declare an emergency, but the lack of definition means an emergency is any situation the president chooses to label as such.

The legislators probably figured that just about everyone knows what an emergency is and, for those who don’t or are a bit hazy, there’s always the dictionary. The Collins English Dictionary defines an emergency as “an unexpected and difficult or dangerous situation, especially an accident, which happens suddenly and which requires quick action to deal with it”.

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