Taking a hard look at what the U.S. government considers a national emergency — and who has the power to define them[1] — says a great deal about the conditions that our government and the leaders of both parties deem to be ordinary and sustainable. The record is not encouraging.

None of the 34 currently active national emergencies relates to the persistent crises of healthcare access, social mobility, and student debt. No emergency proclamation addresses the immanent risk of climate change. Instead, each emergency was declared by the president (Republican or Democrat) over the narrow policy preferences or political interests of the national security establishment. As it turns out, the bipartisan security framework that allows the president to declare emergencies with virtually unchecked impunity is itself a perpetuation of working-class insecurity.

Emergencies all the way down

The U.S. has been in a state of persistent national emergency since November 1979, when President Jimmy Carter declared the first national emergency of the modern era, in response to the U.S. embassy takeover in Tehran. Following the declaration, Carter seized Iranian government assets and set off on an unsuccessful covert mission to free the U.S. diplomatic staff and intelligence operatives held captive in Tehran. Without doubt, the hostage-taking constituted an acute crisis for those involved, but compared to the steady erosion of personal dignity and economic stability caused by the austerity policies of the post-war period, such an event is hardly an emergency, and it is by no means national.

Fast forward to the present (and several dozen ‘emergencies’ later), in February 2019, President Trump declared that “the current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency.” Thus, a caravan predominantly consisting of tired, hungry, and poor asylum seekers and migrants was deemed to constitute a ‘national emergency’. Meanwhile, the moral emergency presented by the ineptly mismanaged and criminal system of child detention centers that was a byproduct of this border policy was entirely ignored.

Not only do these emergency declarations signal the moral indifference of the national security establishment, they also reveal the overlap between parochial military, diplomatic, and corporate interests.

For instance, on October 9, Syrian mercenaries supported by Turkey launched a military incursion into northeast Syria, where they quickly captured several strategic communities and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. Notably, this territory had been controlled by local Kurdish-majority militias. Though historical foes of the Turkish state, these militiamen were nonetheless the most important local partners of the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS in Syria, and U.S. forces actually withdrew from the area to allow the invasion to take place.

The Turkish incursion (unironically dubbed ‘Operation Peace Spring’) followed the failure of a profoundly naive attempt by President Trump to cajole Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan into calling off the invasion. A week later, on October 17, the White House issued Executive Order 13894. The order stated that Turkey’s military invasion “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”

What was the purpose of this emergency declaration in response to actions by a purportedly key NATO ally? Several named individuals in the Turkish administration were sanctioned. However, in parallel, the U.S. continued back-channel negotiations to offer Turkey the opportunity to wind-down tensions. These negotiations did not concern a military withdrawal from northeast Syria or the hand-over of territory that had been seized from U.S. partners, with apparent support from Washington. Rather, the carrot of these negotiations was (and remains) the U.S.-designed Patriot missile defense system, which Turkey refuses to purchase due to disagreement over where the missiles can be manufactured. In turn, this falling-out prompted U.S. officials to boot Turkey from the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

These weapons systems have been centerpieces of U.S. defense partnerships overseas, and they are impressive cash cows for weapons manufactures Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Their performance is less impressive. The Patriot missile system has a failure rate of 90-95 percent. The F-35 program is even worse. It is a masterclass in cost overruns, technical errors,[2] program delays,[3] and the front-loaded procurement schemes that are now part-and-parcel of U.S. overseas diplomacy and inter-military relations.

No checks, no balances

Prior to the reforms of the post-Nixon era, the national emergency powers of the executive were constrained only by norms. Understandably, Richard Nixon’s overt corruption and his slide into drunkenness, paranoia, and instability were important in setting the stage for Congress to place limitations upon the president’s authority to claim extraordinary powers by fiat. The result was the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which codified the terms and limitations of the president’s unilateral emergency authorities.[4]

The National Emergencies Act imposed three safeguards against executive overreach. First, declared emergencies were set to expire automatically after one year, unless purposefully renewed. Second, Congress was given the power to override an emergency declaration in real-time. Third, Congress was instructed to actively revisit the emergency declarations every six months, thus forcing the legislative branch to exercise meaningful oversight by taking ownership over an emergency, or allowing it to expire.

None of these safeguards has been effective. All branches of government are guilty of abdicating responsibility, which has effectively extended the shelf life of national emergencies indefinitely. The Supreme Court has whittled away Congress’s power to override an emergency declaration, thus limiting immediate oversight to ordinary legislation that requires a veto-proof Congressional majority. Additionally, presidents of both parties have been more than willing to use emergency declarations as a routine policy tool. Like other governance-by-rote actions, these declarations have gone unchecked, and they exemplify the imperial presidency. Finally, Congress itself has failed to act. By ignoring the requirement to convene every six months to endorse or nullify emergencies, Congress has shirked its legal responsibility.

The system can work — if we make it

That is not to say that all emergency declarations are necessarily invalid. For instance, President Obama declared a national emergency in 2009 to cope with the coordination needs of the swine flu outbreak. In other respects, however, the Obama and Trump administrations have approached working-class insecurity with a similar disinterest. Obama failed to invoke the same emergency powers — or to use his considerable political capital and a congressional supermajority — to reform the U.S. healthcare system. As a result of a health care access, Americans die of preventable illnesses at rates equivalent to a new 9/11 disaster every month. Likewise, Obama failed to declare a national emergency — or to make any real commitments — over the inevitable global emergency of climate change.

COVID-19 represents a public health crisis that demands an immediate and powerful response. That demand will only be heeded when we force Congress to abandon its reflexive inclination to serve corporate interests ahead of people. We mustn’t stop there: we must use this mobilization as a launch pad to build real political power. The goals may be disparate — Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, Housing for All, anti-imperialism — but they are unified by their emphasis on improving working-class security. If there is a silver lining to the current emergency, it is in the fact that it leaves no room to doubt just how insecure most of us have always been.