On March 15, 2020, two days after then-President Donald Trump declared a national COVID-19 emergency, Cornell law professor Michael C. Dorf urged Congress to impose a nationwide lockdown and suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Congress never took either of those constitutionally dubious steps, which Dorf said were necessary to "save the nation."
Instead, as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch noted last week, "executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale," amounting to one of "the greatest intrusions on civil liberties" in U.S. history. That experience made it clear that legislators needed to reconsider the definition of emergencies and impose limits on the powers they confer.
