Council members in my Rust Belt city do something that has bothered me ever since I started paying attention. At virtually every legislative session that I have observed, when voting to adopt a new measure, they declare a “state of emergency”. Occasionally a resident asks a council member why they do this. Their response is that the city’s charter normally requires them to read a measure twice before passing it, which delays its effective date – but if they declare an emergency, then the measure is effective immediately. Council members find the normal delay unnecessary, in many instances. By granting themselves an exception to the rule, they overcome the inconvenience of the ordinary legislative process established in the city’s foundational law. It just makes things easier for them.

Municipal governments typically define emergency measures as those necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, safety, or welfare. Guardrails on cities’ power to declare a state of emergency are minimal: in my city, the decision must receive at least two-thirds of the council members’ votes, and council must articulate a reason for the need to declare an emergency in the emergency measure itself. Council alone decides what constitutes an emergency.

From time to time, communities encounter exceptional circumstances that call for emergency measures – pandemics and natural disasters, for example. Less dramatic circumstances might also qualify – maybe something like an unexpected deadline to apply for vital public funding that council would miss if it read a measure twice. But my city seems to find emergency circumstances at every legislative session, especially when making decisions related to economic growth and development, and has declared emergencies to create tax increment financing zones for developers of market-rate apartments, to approve designated outdoor refreshment areas for local businesses, to issue bonds, and to otherwise go about its business. Whether these measures are good for the community is beside the point. By using emergency powers under ordinary circumstances to invoke a legislative state of exception, on a regular basis and for any or no reason at all, my city makes the circumvention of democratic processes look like a procedural norm.

An emergency measure, when properly adopted, is not subject to referendum or judicial review, which means that it is a considerable infringement on standard democratic procedure. Even when an emergency measure is not properly adopted, and therefore is subject to legal challenge, courts are deferential to cities’ power to declare emergencies. In addition, the average resident will struggle to demonstrate standing in court (i.e. sufficient connection to the alleged harm to participate in the lawsuit), as taxpayer status is typically not enough. And even a prospective plaintiff who can demonstrate standing is unlikely to have the time and money to sue a government. The result of these barriers to judicial action is that the only practical remedy available to ordinary residents, short of a massive recall effort, is to pressure incumbent representatives while preparing for the next election and hope that the next council behaves differently. But especially under emergency declarations, the damage of the targeted measure will have been done – and the same tool will remain available to the next council. 

A municipal government’s use of emergency powers might seem inconsequential, but it contributes to many communities’ accumulation of debt, housing and commercial space that is affordable to hypothetical residents but not actual ones, surveillance cameras, empty offices and strip malls, and contractual commitments to data centers and private prisons – all without any meaningful public involvement. This is why city charters ordinarily require council to read measures twice before passing them into law. It is among the most rudimentary of all possible democratic safeguards. It is a pacing mechanism, giving residents a chance to comment, petition, protest, and otherwise participate in the making of the laws that shape their lives. Contrary to council’s apparent feeling, it is also an efficiency mechanism, because it opens the legislative process to residents before council acts, legitimizing council’s action and reducing the likelihood that the city will have to defend it later. Through the sustained use of emergency measures, local governments like mine curtail democratic procedures whenever they deem it expedient, especially with regard to economic growth and development, suspending fundamental aspects of our civic lives in an almost constant state of exception.

In 2019, as Trump-appointed US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer was negotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), my city took a stab at innovation. Led by a small group of reformers, my city abandoned a century-old council-manager system of government, in which elected council members recruited a professional city manager to oversee the city’s affairs, in favor of a mayor-council system, in which a “strong” mayor appoints a city manager and other administrative officials to implement the political platform that won the most votes. Although reformers argued that an elected mayor would be more directly accountable to voters than a council-appointed city manager, their campaign (and later the prospective mayor’s) mainly emphasized that the city needed someone to take charge, a “conductor” with the skill and authority to orchestrate administrative functions without delay, a strong-man empowered by council to run the city like a business, cracking heads until the trash was collected, the snow removed, the roads repaired, and the vacant properties made profitable again. The city’s tax base had eroded for too long, they argued, and the council-manager system was too cumbersome to turn things around. The city needed to urgently take steps to recover the population it had lost over decades of Rust Belt decline, in particular by building infrastructure for younger residents with incomes to tax and cash to spend. And for that, it needed someone to play the role of Chief Executive Officer, empowered to cut through red tape, mobilize public resources, and seize development opportunities before some more competitive city could snatch them all up.

The electoral system generated little discernible enthusiasm for this idea. Voter turnout was just over 30% in the election that included the charter amendment creating a role for such a person. About 64% of those voters approved the amendment. This was a statistical landslide, in the world of elections, but it represented only a small slice of the city. Only about 20% of all registered voters actually consented to government by an elected mayor. In the subsequent election to choose a mayor, a pivotal moment in a century of municipal history, the figures were about the same.

The first mayor left no clear evidence of either democratic accountability or head-cracking efficiency. Under the previous system, residents struggled to communicate with the city manager; under the new system, there were times when residents and even council members struggled to reach the mayor at all. Previously, the city manager was an unelected appointee, only directly accountable to council; now the mayor’s various appointees, who served at his pleasure, were not directly accountable to anyone but him. Residents used to worry about financial transparency under the city manager, whose accounting they argued was unsatisfactory; by the end of his tenure, the first mayor had failed to even submit a timely and complete budget for council’s approval, ostensibly because his financial directors kept quitting, putting at risk the city’s very ability to borrow and allocate money. Throughout his tenure, the mayor’s personal scandals and campaign posturing on social media – and above all the power struggle between mayor and council, a structural dynamic that did not previously exist – drained the substance from political discourse both in city hall and around town.

In the end, led by another small group of reformers, residents voted to recall the city’s first mayor. Voter turnout was even lower in that election, around 24%, and more than 80% of those votes were in favor of recall – but as before, only about 20% of all registered voters made the decision.

To be sure, democratic safeguards, such as they were, held firm: nearly 4,000 residents signed a petition to remove the mayor, council respected the referendum results, and (although he attempted to veto the recall and fired the city’s law director in retribution on his way out) the mayor ultimately stepped down shortly before the natural end of his term. But it was a herculean effort, socially disruptive and without any obvious long-term benefit, and few of the city’s residents were bothered enough to take part.

In the wake of the recall drama, council has attempted to claw back some of the power it originally delegated to the mayor by once again amending the charter, adding several checks on the mayor’s authority and requiring transparent communication between mayor and council – but it has not publicly critiqued the mayor-council form of government. One of the leaders of the campaign for an elected mayor, who also serves on council, has publicly maintained that the problem with the mayor is personal, not structural – it’s just a matter of picking the right person for the job, and maybe tweaking the rules a bit. After making those tweaks, and again with the approval of approximately 20% of the city’s registered voters, council adopted the charter amendment’s language on first reading, as an emergency measure, “for the immediate preservation of the public peace, property, health, safety, and welfare”. 

Throughout 2025, as President Trump and his appointees taxed US importers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) – alternatively citing “invasion” by “illegal aliens”, trading partners’ failure to control the flow of illicit drugs, a lack of “reciprocity” in trade relationships, and the purchase of Russian oil as emergencies justifying such action – my city’s first mayor was defending his performance as the city’s “CEO”. Despite having appointed a Performance Coordinator to implement a “Lean Six Sigma workflow” and a Communications Specialist to explain his agenda to the community, council and residents had grown doubtful of his administration’s ability to satisfy their needs and desires. Not only had the mayor implemented a variety of inert programs and generally failed to demonstrate substantial progress in any direction, but he had also committed a series of indiscretions, all of which ultimately led to his recall. These indiscretions included refusing to cooperate with council, granting contracts to close friends, and refusing to intervene in racialized verbal abuse of public servants by a family member with unusually free range within city hall. At the peak of this drama, in response to council’s attempts to exercise its role as a check to the mayor’s authority, the mayor seemed to rest his defense on a telling statement: “Council is by no means my overseer.” 

Just as the state of emergency concentrates power in the legislature, the strong mayor system concentrates power in the executive. My city’s council has not created emergency powers for the mayor, and I suspect they won’t anytime soon – but they also don’t need to, because their creation of the mayor’s role was itself an emergency measure. The mayor’s role was conceived as a way to pursue urgent growth, to combat the looming threat of further economic decline, by placing the reins of the administrative apparatus in the hands of a strong leader. Unlike the legislative emergency, which concentrates power only momentarily, the mayor-as-emergency permanently embeds concentrated power in the structure of city government.

In the old council-manager system, elected representatives’ power was distributed fairly evenly: voters elected city council members, who selected a president from their own ranks and collectively chose a city manager from a pool of external candidates. The selection of a council president was more a delegation of responsibility than a grant of power, as the president had little to no power beyond that of any other council member. Similarly, the city manager, a professional administrator hired to run city hall’s day-to-day operations, had no power beyond what council members collectively allowed. In short, the old system allowed several elected representatives to further delegate, through an open deliberative process, certain parts of the labor of government administration to someone with expertise that they did not themselves possess, and to oversee that person on behalf of their constituents.

In the new mayor-council system, voters still elect council members, but they also elect a chief executive, the mayor, and the mayor then appoints whomever he wants to implement his agenda as he sees fit – including a city manager, who is now accountable only to him. Council, as a legislative body, may limit the mayor’s authority and resist its improper exercise, but in general the mayor and his appointees are free from the oversight and interference of either elected council members or the general public in their day-to-day work. Within legislative parameters, he can appoint and remove department heads, draft the budget, and enforce legislation at his discretion. By design, the strong mayor has no need to overcome the inconveniences of democratic processes by declaring an emergency, as council does, because his election theoretically presupposes the democratic legitimacy of any action he takes in furtherance of his political platform.

Besides electing certain representatives, ordinary residents have little control over municipal decision-making. Nothing within the electoral system, besides an assumption that a candidate’s success indicates popular acceptance of their platform, serves to identify voters’ actual needs or desires, and little else but good faith and a desire for reelection requires representatives to actually pursue them.

The change to a strong mayor system has made my city’s government more like the federal government: in place of a legislative body that oversees administrative functions, we now have a legislative body that checks the power of an executive who decides how to run administrative functions. This change has re-centered political discourse around the council-mayor relationship and the mayor’s individual performance, rather than around the government’s work and council’s collective performance. There is less public accountability, not more. And because the mayor, unlike the former city manager, is empowered to control an entire administrative bureaucracy, limited only to the extent that council can limit him, the system hinges on the competence and good faith of the mayor and his cohort.

Unlike the mayor of my small Rust Belt city, the President of the United States has both the reins of the administrative state and emergency powers. Congress has delegated a great deal of emergency and otherwise exceptional powers to the Executive, in particular since 9/11. The Trump Administration’s extensive use of these powers has been especially visible in the area of international trade since 2016. In August of 2024, I wrote that, with regard to trade, the Trump Administration considers democratic accountability “an unfair disadvantage that the adversary does not share”, quoting historian Quinn Slobodian. The US’s main “adversary” in trade, according to bipartisan consensus, has long been China. But this term, the Administration has manufactured additional adversaries and emergencies, first under IEEPA. 

When the Supreme Court found the Administration’s use of IEEPA unconstitutional, the President and his advisors turned to Section 122, suddenly finding, by Presidential Proclamation, that the balance of trade built and maintained over generations of national leadership had created problems that “significantly harm[ed] United States national interests, including economic and national security interests,” and that “special measures to restrict imports [were] required to address those problems.” By the time the Court of International Trade had invalidated the Administration’s use of Section 122, the President and his advisors had already begun “testing” the domestic forced labor policies of 60 trade partners, finding that every last one had “burden[ed] or restrict[ed] US commerce” by failing “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor” and imposing 10-12.5% tariffs as a result, using Section 301 – the same authority it used to impose tariffs on China during Trump’s first term – to effectively replace the tariff regime it had achieved only temporarily using IEEPA and Section 122.

In March 2026, just days after the Administration formally announced its initiation of forced labor investigations under Section 301, the President publicly praised the Fanjul brothers, Cuban exiles and billionaire owners of a sprawling real estate and sugar empire, including Domino, Florida Crystals, and a stake in Central Romana, the largest sugarcane producer in the Dominican Republic. Following decades of documented labor abuses, Central Romana had been under a Withhold Release Order (WRO) from November 2022 until March 2025, when the Administration removed it without explanation or press release. As of July 2026, with regard to tariffs, all Dominican sugarcane producers are on the same footing. Americans can buy sugar produced with forced labor, but the US now charges the importer 12.5% more – and not because the sugar is produced with forced labor, but because the Dominican Republic’s general failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor is “unreasonable or discriminatory and burdens or restricts US commerce”, in the meaning of Section 301.

Exceptional authority is the very foundation of the Administration’s approach to trade. In July 2026, USTR Jamieson Greer opened his presentation at the Senate Committee on Finance’s Hearing on the President’s Trade Agenda accordingly:

As you know, the President’s trade policy in 2025 was defined by a national emergency: a $1.2 trillion trade deficit, which had exploded 40% in the prior four years, and an industrial base too atrophied to support our national security and economic competitiveness, let alone a strong middle class. That national emergency still exists, and so our policy remains the same. The specific authorities this Administration is using have changed, but the trade strategy has not.

Indeed, even though the Supreme Court found the Administration’s use of IEEPA unconstitutional, it did not remove the corresponding national emergencies. National emergencies are still in effect for “illicit drugs” crossing the northern border, the “situation” at the southern border, the “large and persistent” goods trade deficit, synthetic opioids from China, and “threats” from the government of Brazil related to its justice system’s prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Echoing USTR Greer’s confidence in the Administration’s ability to pursue its trade agenda regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling, President Trump stressed his executive independence during his subsequent State of the Union address:

…despite the disappointing ruling… [the tariffs] will remain in place… Congressional action will not be necessary… Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with [open borders and] record-setting inflation… Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them… So now I’m calling on Congress to codify my most-favored-nation program into law.

Although the President’s words are hard to decipher, the message from every member of the Administration is consistent: trade policy comes from the executive branch. As I have witnessed the Administration’s response to the Supreme Court’s IEEPA ruling, my former mayor’s defiant reaction to city council’s attempts to check his authority reverberate in my mind, and I see him in the President’s place, behind a podium at a press conference or giving the State of the Union: “The Supreme Court and Congress are by no means my overseers.”

No matter who is in the White House, as long as laws delegating trade authority to the executive branch remain in effect, the President, the Cabinet, and their partners in industry will retain the power to direct trade policy – and the current Administration is testing the boundaries of that power. As enacted in 1977, IEEPA contained a legislative veto, which would have allowed Congress to override any emergency declared under that authority. The Supreme Court found the legislative veto unconstitutional in 1983, in INS v. Chadha, severing the legislative veto from IEEPA but leaving in place its delegation of authority. Although the Supreme Court’s has found limits to the President’s authority to impose universal tariffs through IEEPA, it has not closed the door to emergency powers or other exceptional delegations of trade authority. As USTR Greer told the Senate Committee on Finance, the “problems the President’s trade policy seeks to solve are generational – things were not broken in a day and they will not be fixed overnight. But they must be fixed.” Both this administration and the next, like my city council, can still find emergencies and similarly exceptional circumstances to justify its policies, if not through IEEPA then through regulations such as Sections 122, 232, 301, or 338.

What bothers me is that neither I nor you, average reader, have any meaningful control over these policies that shape our lives – our global image, our jobs, our cost of living, and even our communities’ social, economic, and physical infrastructure. If Congress has delegated vast authority in trade policy-making to the executive branch – ostensibly to empower the President and his cabinet to address certain issues with greater efficiency – but retained no check on that authority, then what democratic safeguard ensures that the President’s trade policy bears a relationship to the actual needs and desires of ordinary people like me or you? 

However flawed Congress’s representation of ordinary people’s interests may be, the alternative, under present legal structures, is far worse. Almost no voter considers, in the months leading up to a presidential election, that the likes of Howard Lutnick, or Scott Bessent, or Jamieson Greer, or Stephen Miran, or any of the other unelected cabinet members or peripheral advisors, accountable ultimately to the President, will be crafting the next administration’s approach to international trade. No democratic process authorizes the roles that powerful actors like Elon Musk, or the Fanjul family, or any of the frontiersmen of artificial intelligence play in steering international trade policy.

Economist Thorstein Veblen would liken these private actors to the “titans of industry” of his time, and their supporters in government to enlisted coordinators. The Trump Administration’s trade policy amounts to what Veblen might regard as a conscious withdrawal of efficiency, increasing the cost of international business and ultimately sabotaging the productive capacities of foreign and domestic firms alike. But the Administration is willing to grant exceptions. For example, it withdrew Central Romana’s WRO, created an exclusions portal for Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum (and more recently a process for requesting inclusions), removed certain products from Section 301 lists, and stipulated that importers can earn reduced duty rates in exchange for capital expenditures in the United States. 

The current Administration has used longstanding delegations of trade authority to create an economy of exception. As Dr. Nina Tzouvala has written, the Administration’s approach to trade has begun to “remake the relationship between capital and political power in the US”, creating a chaotic tariff environment in which “political authority [is becoming] the direct source of economic power, such that states do not simply create, regulate or guarantee opportunities for profit- and rent-seeking but rather directly distribute them to their political allies while denying them” to their adversaries. The accumulation of power in the executive branch has led to greater government involvement in private enterprise, less public accountability, and poorer outcomes for ordinary people – and that will not fundamentally change, no matter who is in the White House, as long as the enabling structures remain in place.

In its IEEPA ruling, Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court found that Congress, not the President or any other part of the executive branch, has the power to impose and collect taxes, including tariffs, at least during peacetime and absent a clear congressional delegation of such authority. The majority opinion and three concurrences quibbled about the proper basis for the finding, arguing over internally meaningful questions of statutory interpretation – namely the utility and even legitimacy of the major questions doctrine, which has to do with the constitutional separation of powers. Three dissenters – Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas – felt that IEEPA properly delegated a broad range of international trade powers to the President, including the power to tax imported goods. Only Justice Jackson, in her lone concurrence, displayed a self-conscious awareness of the case’s relationship between emergency powers and a democratic system of government:

The dissent concludes that IEEPA [is] “best understood” as authorizing tariffs, and that any other interpretation would “not make much sense.” But why would it matter which interpretation we think is “best” when Congress has already told us? The legislative history here plainly establishes that Congress understood and intended IEEPA […] to authorize a wholly different type of power: the power to freeze foreign-owned property. And the proper role of the Court is to give effect to Congress’s intent, not our own instincts… In short, in these cases, the legislative history provides helpful evidence of “what Congress was trying to do” in IEEPA. Given that evidence, we need not speculate or, worse, step into Congress’s shoes and formulate our own views about what powers would be best to delegate to the President for use during an emergency… When Congress tells us why it has included certain language in a statute, the limited role of the courts in our democratic system of government—as interpreters, not lawmakers—demands that we give effect to the will of the people.

We cannot rely on every elected official to practice the same humility and deference to democratic processes as Justice Jackson – in Washington or city hall. We should not tolerate a political economy that runs on the good faith and competence of a single elected leader and his chosen collaborators – whether that person is the President or the mayor. We need democratic safeguards to ensure that the policies that shape our lives are made and implemented in pursuit of our needs and desires – mine and yours, not those of Veblen’s “titans of industry” – both in international trade and local development.

In the United States and elsewhere, especially since 9/11, we have grown accustomed to the top-down exercise of emergency and other exceptional powers. They have come to seem normal, even routine. We have become numb, since 2016, to the Administrations raising and lowering and exempting and excluding of different goods and companies and countries from tariffs. We hardly notice, if we notice at all, city council’s declaration of emergencies, “for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, safety, or welfare”, to speed up the construction of office buildings and luxury apartments and other revenue-generating developments. But it is not normal for a government to bypass democratic processes – not in a democracy.

As a first step, we as a trade community should consider how we can work together to persuade Congress to restore its tariff power by rescinding or severely limiting the exceptional powers it has granted to the executive branch, in particular the President, under laws such as Sections 122, 232, 301, 338, and most certainly IEEPA. As ordinary people, we should consider the proper balance of power in a democracy, and how we can claim control over the destinies of our towns, cities, counties, states, and regions, wherever we live – and we should work together to claim it.