Not Everything Is an Emergency

Source: The Dispatch
by Ilya Somin

“The Trump administration has attempted to make sweeping use of emergency powers in the areas of immigration, trade, and domestic use of the military. In each case, President Donald Trump has tried to use powers legally reserved for extreme exigencies — invasion, war, grave threats to national security — to address essentially normal political challenges. … In litigation over all three of its major invocations of emergency powers — immigration, tariffs, and domestic use of the military — the administration has also invoked the ‘political questions’ doctrine, which holds that some issues are off limits to the judiciary, because they have been left to the political process. The Supreme Court’s precedent here is an often incoherent mess. But there is no general principle holding that invocations of emergency powers are exempt from judicial scrutiny.” (07/31/25)

https://thedispatch.com/article/not-everything-is-an-emergency/