Biden, progressives and the perpetual-emergency presidency

Progressive lawmakers are once again calling on President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would give him sweeping new executive powers to do pretty much whatever he wants. It is just one more example of how progressives, who are constantly lecturing the country about the threats to democracy, are eager to ignore the democratically elected members of Congress — and the U.S. Constitution — in order to get their way.

According to Bloomberg, “An emergency declaration by President Joe Biden would unlock sweeping executive powers, including blocking crude oil exports and placing other limits on fossil fuels.”

The catalyst for the latest climate-emergency demand was Canadian wildfire smoke that settled on much of the northeast, including New York City and Washington, D.C.

But progressives don’t really need a catalyst — they just use that to get more media attention. They have been calling on Biden to declare a climate emergency for at least a year.

Last summer, several Democrats pressed Biden to declare a climate emergency when it looked like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) might not pass Congress. Once Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) flipped and cut a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the IRA passed in August.

But that didn’t stop the calls for a climate emergency. Indeed, it energized them. Last October, eight Senate Democrats urged Biden to declare a climate emergency, even though the IRA had passed and the funds were flowing out. The senators asserted that while the IRA was helpful, it wasn’t enough to reach Biden’s emission-cutting goal.

“We will only achieve these [Biden’s] targets if you build off the momentum of the IRA with strong executive action. We urge you to take the important next step of declaring a climate emergency and unlocking the full tools at your disposal to address this crisis,” the group stated.

But note that declaring an emergency is a good idea only when it promotes the Democratic agenda. President Trump declared a national emergency in February 2019 to bypass Congress in an effort to build his border wall on the Southern border, and Democrats adamantly opposed that effort.

“A president’s emergency powers should not be used wantonly. What we cannot afford, however, is to shy away from tackling the climate crisis just because President Trump misused the National Emergencies Act,” Democrats declared at the time.

Yes, there are times when a president needs to use the executive authority to declare an emergency. And there are general rules and practices that guide the decision to declare a national emergency. But they are meant to address an unforeseen, temporary emergency. They are not meant to implement long-term policy initiatives, which is exactly how progressives want to use a climate emergency.

For example, the lawmakers are suggesting that Biden could use a climate emergency declaration to block crude oil exports. How that would help reduce the wildfire smoke in the northeast, which has already diminished significantly, is anybody’s guess — especially since progressives’ climate wishlist won’t address Canadian problems.

There seems to be some general agreement that government failure is the primary reason behind this season’s extensive wildfires. Here’s the New York Times: “Canada’s capacity to prevent wildfires has been shrinking for decades because of budget cuts, a loss of some of the country’s forest service staff, and onerous rules for fire prevention, turning some of its forests into a tinderbox.” Incidentally, those are pretty much the same reasons behind California’s frequent wildfires, especially the failure to manage forests.

But then progressives’ call for Biden to declare a climate emergency isn’t really about Canada’s wildfires — which, besides sending some American firefighters to help, the U.S. can’t do much about.

The real reason for the climate emergency push is to bypass the Republican House of Representatives and perhaps a few reluctant Democratic senators and impose a much more stringent climate agenda.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen on several occasions. At the behest of progressives, Biden kept the national health emergency over COVID-19 active long past the day when the country had moved on so that he could justify continuing to delay students repaying their loans or landlords from evicting renters. Biden needed a national health emergency to do what the Constitution or Congress wouldn’t otherwise allow him to do.

The remarkable thing is that these same progressives repeatedly warn the country that democracy is on the verge of collapse. But the biggest threat to U.S. democracy isn’t some state election laws, it’s the effort to create a much more powerful executive who can ignore the duly elected representatives of the people.

Merrill Matthews is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @MerrillMatthews