The incessant inaction of Congress means that President Donald Trump is increasingly using emergency powers to get things done.
From tariffs to immigration to cartels to crime, Trump has repeatedly cited the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to gain the authority to take action.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Congress is perfectly capable of legislating on these issues and more, but its members are too consumed with staging victimhood pageants and crying on the Capitol steps to pass laws and demand their enforcement.
Take tariffs: Trump declared an emergency to impose them on many US trading partners, aiming to give America an upper hand — or at least equality — in global commerce.
That’s traditionally the job of Congress, which can also expressly delegate tariff authority to the president.
Instead, Congress has done nothing — it hasn’t taken charge, and it hasn’t handed tariff powers to Trump outright.
Members have just sat by and watched the matter grind its way through the courts. Sure, blame politics. Republicans hold the House and Senate, but their majorities are so slim that they’re afraid to use power lest they make a misstep and lose it.
Democrats are playing to far-left voters who will eat their own if they sense any deviation from party orthodoxy.
Compromise won’t keep anyone’s constituents happy — quite the opposite.
Once, Congress was all about finding common ground. Now it’s about holding a hard line and never giving an inch, on both sides.
Gutless.
Washington, DC, has been under home rule since Congress authorized it in 1973, but what has it done for the district lately?
Nothing.
Members hire private security to ensure their safety in a city they’ve abandoned to homicides, crime and homelessness.
Trump saw our nation’s capital as a personal humiliation when global leaders observed the tent cities, trash, crumbling infrastructure and horrific crime.
So he took charge when literally no one else would — only for so-called leaders in local government and Congress to complain that he took emergency action when they would not.
Americans gave Trump a mandate to deport illegal immigrants after President Joe Biden flung open the borders and signed all comers up for government benefits.
Biden wrung his hands, saying he couldn’t stem the tide, that he needed Congress to act. It didn’t.
Trump has shown that if members of Congress are too busy navel-gazing, posting TikToks and proposing self-aggrandizing bills that will never pass, he will rescue the country from chaos.
And Congress has still done nothing, content to let the fate of the nation be decided in the courtrooms of activist judges who see themselves as arbiters of global justice — not American laws.
Cartel criminals have turned the United States into an open-air drug market, making our citizens sedated zombies and profiting off our pain — what is that if not an emergency?
Members of Congress do nothing but issue resolutions and virtue-signal with grieving families.
Trump bombs drug boats and tells international narco-terrorists there’s more where that came from.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said.
It’s sure more effective than Congress’ members complaining on the Capitol steps about authoritarianism.
Now Trump’s team may declare housing a national emergency, even though the goal of getting people into homes is not new.
We’ve yet to see what that will mean, but nothing Trump dreams up could be worse than the Democrat-led plan of giving people loans they couldn’t afford, then watching them go under when the bills came due.
Unilateral executive action is not the ideal, we know that — it’s a concept we ditched when we threw all that tea in the harbor.
We are not a people who wish to be ruled by fiat.
As our founding documents established, we are meant to have our say via our representatives in the people’s House.
It’s up to our members of Congress to act on our behalf, so why won’t they?
We’d rather see our representatives act as if they have a stake in this nation beyond the next Election Day.
Governing by emergency, tackling one crisis after another with executive power, is not how our system was designed to work.
But our system is not working, as members of Congress show up on news shows more often than they show up for their constituents.
Trump is taking a huge risk by staking his presidency on handling each of these issues with emergency powers.
If he fails, we’ll know who to blame.
But if Trump succeeds — if immigration is curbed, if drug cartels are destroyed, if tariffs enrich us, if more Americans buy their own homes — we’ll know who deserves the praise.
Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief at the Post Millennial.
