One constitutional scholar is sounding the alarm about the president’s use of emergency powers and has called for Congress and the courts to step in.
Writing in Lawfare, Ben Diamond, a PSVF Langer Fellow at the Center for Applied Environmental Law and Policy, cites Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote in 1952 that “Emergency powers would tend to kindle emergencies.” And Diamond calls for the courts and Congress to heed that call.
“President Trump’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose global tariffs continued a long-standing pattern of presidents using IEEPA authority as a “standard tool of foreign policy” in response to emergencies of questionable legitimacy,” Diamond writes. “Beyond IEEPA, however, past presidents have generally exercised self-restraint, largely reserving non-IEEPA powers for responses to genuine crises.”
He also notes that Trump has invoked emergency powers more frequently than most other presidents.
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“In just one year, President Trump issued roughly as many non-IEEPA emergency orders as any of his predecessors issued across their entire four or eight years in office. At this rate, Trump is on pace to issue six and a half times more non-IEEPA emergency orders than were issued during the average presidential term this century. That is more than every previous presidential administration since 2000 combined. Even excluding the surge in emergency orders during his first month in office, Trump is still on pace to issue more non-IEEPA emergency orders than the combined total of President Obama, President Biden, and President Trump’s first administration.”
“Where Congress falls short, the judiciary must step in to uphold the separation of powers. In particular, courts may need to apply a more searching form of judicial review to effectively constrain bad-faith abuse of emergency powers,” writes Ben Diamond. pic.twitter.com/oUXkacr5QT
— Lawfare (@lawfare) April 14, 2026
“President Trump is not the first president to invoke emergency powers for less-than-crisis-level policy matters. But the sheer scale, pace, and breadth of emergency powers deployed by this administration presents an opportunity for courts to reject this behavior and rein in executive overreach,” Diamond concludes. “The tariffs case is a step in the right direction. Courts should continue to heed Justice Jackson’s prescient warnings and prevent this administration—and all future ones—from eroding the separation of powers under the guise of emergency.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
