In 2020, as America grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, I worried that President Donald Trump’s invoking of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to cope with the the Health Emergency would be a dangerous precedent that could clear the way for a Democratic President to declare a “Climate Emergency,” giving the federal government totalitarian executive powers.
Alas, President Joe Biden is getting pressure from Congressional Democrats to do just that — declare a Climate Emergency in order to impose draconian Leftist climate change policies that he can’t get through Congress.
Fortunately, Biden is resisting the idea, so far. And pushback is developing, including from some on the Left. Tom Moran, editorial page editor for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, strongly condemned the idea in no uncertain terms. In No, don’t declare a climate emergency, Moran warned about a power that “could quickly spin out of control.” “The threat of authoritarian rule by unchecked presidents,” Moran presciently observes, “is easy to see.”
To be sure, Moran includes the obligatory Leftist Chicken Little panic mongering hyperbole about climate change. “the climate crisis is spinning out of control as Congress fiddles.” “The climate crisis is causing chaos and suffering across the globe and promises to get much worse.” And the like.
But, paradoxically, the fact that Moran is a card-carrying climate catastrophist gives his warning all the more credibility. He rightly sees the threat of American authoritarianism to be a much greater danger than anything climate change can throw at us.
And as I viewed Trump’s DPA declaration as the crucial precedent, Moran reaches back further:
Three years ago, President Trump declared a state of emergency so he could use money from the defense budget to start building his wall along the Mexican border.
The reason was simple: He lost the political fight in Congress, so he used these powers as an end-run around our democracy. Another norm broken.
It was the first time the emergency laws were abused like that, historians say. The laws were intended to help a president cope with true emergencies that could not wait for Congress, like hurricanes, pandemics and invasions. Using it to defy the will of Congress was new.
Moran consults Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice:
“What Trump did with the emergency powers is exactly what Congress said he couldn’t do,” said Goitein.
Now, progressives want to break the same norm, and are pressing President Biden to declare an emergency over climate change, having lost the fight in Congress. It’s another end-run.
“I understand the temptation,” Moran says,
But Goitein, at Brennan, warns that this could quickly spin out of control, that if Biden declares an emergency over climate, a Republican president could declare an emergency over, say, abortion, and impose a nationwide ban.
“When Trump did this, you could argue it was an aberration, because he was an anomaly in every way imaginable,” she says. “But if Biden now uses it this way, to get around Congress, that would really shatter the norm.”
Philosophically, this is the kind of good political thinking that we rarely see any more. On this issue, Moran is channeling the same reverence for the importance of principles as the Founding Fathers.
The Founder' reverence for principle is demonstrated in these excerpts from James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments". In his dramatic defense of religious liberty in opposition to Virginia's proposed tax to support the Christian Church, he said:
[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. (Emphasis added.)
The principle James Madison was referring to was the one underlying a Virginia law, known as “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”. He understood that once any governmental “department of power overleap[s] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people, . . . there is no way to contain that power, because . . . the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience . . . is held by the same tenure with all our other rights.” (Emphasis added.) Madison elaborates on this crucial point:
Either we must say, that they may control the freedom of the press, may abolish the Trial by Jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary Powers of the State; nay that they may despoil us of our very right of suffrage, and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary Assembly or, we must say, that they have no authority to enact into the law the Bill under consideration.
Notice the broad sweep of the rights that Madison saw threatened by a single religion-funding bill in a single state. The same can be said about a single climate change emergency declaration, whether at the federal or state level. The principle behind a climate emergency declaration threatens all of our rights.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. Tom Moran is no equal to the Founding Fathers. That said, keep Madison's wisdom in mind as you read this editorial, and you can appreciate the power of Moran’s warning.
Moran offers more examples of the consequences of the abuses of presidential emergency declarations, including George W. Bush’s broad violation of Muslim-Americans’ rights under a national security declaration following 9/11:
But if this norm is broken, presidents of both parties could claim emergency powers that are more far-reaching, Goitein warns, especially when a president declares a national security emergency.
“The real scary ones give a president the power to shut down communications facilities in an emergency, and to freeze assets and block financial transactions,” she says.
Which, if Goitein is correct, was exactly what was done to Muslim Americans.
If I read Goitein’s premise correctly, she is basically saying there are effectively no limits on what the executive branch can impose under emergency declarations. What can political authorities not do as justified under the alleged need to “fight climate change?” Sounds like totalitarian powers to me—or at least as close to totalitarian as a president can get away with. And if the recent COVID pandemic is any indication, politicians can get away with quite a lot of usurpations of our liberties.
Perhaps that’s why, as Moran points out, “Congress is considering reforms, like imposing tight time limits on emergency powers unless Congress votes to extend them.”
That’s encouraging. “In the end,” Moran concludes,
the emergency declaration seems like a political stunt, a way for Democrats like Booker to signal their concern and militancy, to answer the frustration in the party.
But it wouldn’t help much in the climate fight, and it would weaken our democracy. That’s a bad deal.
It sure is a bad deal—and, I will add, for our republic.
Kudos to Moran for clarifying the immense dangers inherent in any climate emergency declaration. I hope Biden will heed it.
Related:
‘Climate Emergency’: A Nonsensical, and Dangerous, Misuse of Words
As We Endure Through COVID-19, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism
‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism
Rand Paul, Title 2, and the Importance of Principles
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