Civitas No. 8

On Emergency Power and the Normalization of Exception

To The People of the United States:

Every free government makes provision for emergency. None can survive without it. War, disaster, and sudden danger require speed where deliberation would be fatal. The Constitution does not deny this reality; it assumes it. But it also assumes something else -- that emergency powers are justified by necessity, not by duration, and that what is tolerated in crisis must not be permitted to harden into habit.

The danger does not arise when emergency powers are invoked. It arises when they are not relinquished.

An exception, by definition, is temporary. It suspends ordinary rules to meet extraordinary conditions. Yet history reveals a recurring pattern: powers granted as exceptions outlive the circumstances that justified them. Temporary measures become standing authorities. Extraordinary discretion becomes routine governance. What was once unthinkable becomes merely inconvenient to question.

Crises shift authority from law to discretion. Rules are replaced with orders; processes with directives; consent with compliance. This shift is often welcomed. Fear sharpens focus, and uncertainty breeds impatience with restraint. In such moments, constitutional discipline is recast as delay, and limits as luxury. The public does not resist this shift; it demands it.

Citizens trade restraint for reassurance. They accept surveillance in exchange for safety, mandates in exchange for normalcy, and silence in exchange for stability. The bargain is framed as temporary. It rarely is. What is surrendered under pressure is seldom fully recovered once pressure subsides.

This is not because leaders conspire to deceive, though ambition is never absent. It is because power, once acquired, generates reasons for its own preservation. Agencies built to address emergencies must justify their continued existence. Authorities granted to respond to danger search for new dangers to manage. In this way, exception becomes structure, and fear becomes a renewable resource.

The most unsettling feature of this process is not its speed, but its familiarity. Each generation inherits emergency powers normalized by the last. The public forgets the original justification and accepts the authority as given. What was once controversial becomes invisible. The boundary between ordinary governance and emergency rule dissolves, not through force, but through precedent.

Liberties lost in this manner are not seized; they are consented away. The citizen is not dragged into submission; he complies. He fills out the form, downloads the app, shows the pass, accepts the rule -- because it is easier than resistance, because it is framed as temporary, because everyone else is doing the same. Compliance becomes civic virtue. Questioning becomes selfishness.

This is how free peoples lose their limits without ever voting to do so.

Emergency power is uniquely dangerous because it teaches a false lesson: that liberty is incompatible with safety. Once this belief takes hold, restraint appears irresponsible and resistance immoral. Citizens begin to police one another on behalf of authority, enforcing norms that were never law and excusing measures that would once have been intolerable.

The Constitution does not fail in these moments. It is bypassed. Not by revolution, but by acquiescence. The forms remain; the habits change. Law persists in name, while discretion governs in fact.

The lesson is neither novel nor partisan. It applies regardless of the crisis invoked or the policy preferred. A people who accept indefinite emergency rule in one domain should expect it in others. Powers justified to address health will be repurposed for security; those granted for security will migrate to finance; those established for finance will be invoked for stability itself. The logic is continuous even when the rhetoric changes.

The question is not whether emergencies will occur. They will. The question is whether The People will remember that emergencies end -- and that powers justified by fear must expire with it. Where citizens forget this, authority does not retreat on its own.

A free people must therefore be more vigilant in calm than in crisis. It must demand sunsets, review, and relinquishment when fear has passed. It must resist the comforting lie that temporary surrender ensures permanent safety. History offers no such guarantee.

The erosion of liberty rarely begins with tyranny. It begins with reassurance. And by the time reassurance becomes routine, the limits that once restrained power exist only as memories --invoked too late, and restored only at great cost.

Civitas Americana