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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

That sounds very good, except for four ominous words in the article: "declares a national emergency". If I understand correctly (and I could well be wrong), in a national emergency, the president can (temporarily, theoretically) assume powers that neither Congress nor the Constitution gives him. Lincoln did this, briefly, during the Civil War.

The article doesn't give any more detail on the "national emergency". But I worry that it could be a "get out of jail free" card for the president to do more than Congress authorized in the IEEPA.

Does anyone know enough to shed some light here?

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The whole concept of the IEEPA is to define the scope of powers the President has when he declares a national emergency.

The history of the IEEPA was that before it was passed in the 1970s, Congress felt like there were not enough controls on the President's emergency powers. So we're discussing a delegation of power designed for exactly the circumstance you're talking about.

The concern that the President could claim extralegal powers in an "emergency" is legitimate, but you can't reasonably point to a case where he's working within the narrow guidelines established by Congress specifically to avoid that outcome as evidence that that's happening.

Got it, thanks.

We've been in a national emergency since September 14, 2001. http://www.msnbc.com/all/obama-quietly-extends-post-911-stat...

I'm not sure if that was extended in 2014 but after some googling I also found that we have multiple ongoing national emergencies http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/22/presi...

The NEA means national emergencies aren't a simple binary state. Instead, the President invokes "emergencies" on an as-needed basis to access specific powers delegated to him by Congress, which can shut him down with a vote (and, of course, can repeal the grants of power altogether).

So it's not as if the President can say "oh noez hackers national emergency!", suspend habeas, and imprison Michal Zalewski†. Instead: Congress gave the President the authority to recognize arbitrary foreign powers as "threats" and, pursuant to the declaration of a "national emergency", to interfere with their financial transactions. That's what Obama has done here, presumably with China as the subtext.

In the wake of KindHearts, if these powers are executed against American citizens or organizations, they can be challenged and overturned on 4th Amendment grounds. (Note the powers we're talking about are, again, only meaningful in the context of foreign transactions, or assets whose beneficiaries are foreign threat actors).

† I'm not saying you said this.

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