The United States Constitution has no special provision for emergency government.

The Constitution’s Framers were hardly strangers to the concept of crisis powers, in both theory and practice. John Locke’s philosophical work, for example, was a familiar influence on their thinking, including his assertion that a functional government must have emergency capacities “to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.” For Locke, no set of formal government structures, however well intended, could deal effectively with every contingency.

The Framers’ lived experience confirmed Locke’s wisdom. The government prescribed by the Articles of Confederation found itself overmatched in trying to prosecute successfully the American Revolution in the 1770s, finding warmaking by committee dangerously ineffective. They solved the problem by conveying vast discretion to General George Washington, who, according to one English critic, became “the dictator of America.”¹ Washington was empowered to raise and equip troops; to commandeer provisions; to mete out justice; to impose public health standards—including mandatory smallpox inoculation—and in general to deploy forces as he saw fit, unencumbered by meaningful congressional oversight. This occurred at a time when all the national governing authority resided in the Continental Congress.

Yet anyone seeking emergency protocols in the Constitution subsequently crafted in 1787 is left to cobble together scattered fragments: to wit, the suspension clause (habeas corpus) in Article 1, the commander-in-chief clause in Article 2, and the guarantee clause in Article 4.

Even in the absence of a well-defined constitutional structure, however, there has been a rich history of emergency government in the United States. Under threat of genuine crisis, Americans have simply behaved differently, modifying their normal institutional practices.

Even in the absence of a well-defined constitutional structure, however, there has been a rich history of emergency government in the United States

Abraham Lincoln—a one-time Whig whose most celebrated speech as a young man warned of dangers to our political institutions from excessive power in one person²—was, for the first eleven weeks of his presidency, personally the government of the United States, not even calling Congress back into session until he could get the Union war effort begun in a direction he established. He blockaded Southern ports. He spent tax dollars that had not been appropriated to raise, provision, and deploy troops. And he later signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which, by the conventions of the day, amounted to a monumental taking of private property.

Lincoln’s powers were subsequently dwarfed by Woodrow Wilson, who could direct Americans as to how much sugar they could add to their morning coffee during World War I. During the Great Depression and then the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran a command economy. For a time, he shut down the nation’s banks. He directed human and natural resources to where he judged they were most needed. He controlled prices.

He also supervised the growth of an unprecedented defense and national security state, authorizing surveillance of public and private communications. This included interning Japanese Americans and sanctioning the development of the most lethal weapon ever used, without substantial checks by Congress or the judiciary. And during nearly five decades of Cold War, some of these enhanced authorities reappeared, especially in instances where the nation’s security seemed especially vulnerable. George W. Bush later vastly expanded that security state, conducting a Global War on Terror, including the invasion of two countries in less than eighteen months.

There are three lessons from this accumulated experience of special relevance today as the incumbent president seeks to be an emergency-empowered leader.

First, presidents have successfully claimed vast powers in each of these prior instances because there existed an undeniable system-threatening crisis: Southern secession leading to civil war; the Great War; complete economic collapse; Pearl Harbor and a second world war; the Cold War’s perpetual, if uneven, threat of nuclear annihilation; and then the stunning terrorist attacks of 9/11. These, and these alone, are the circumstances that have produced what Clinton Rossiter called “constitutional dictatorship.”³

Presidents have successfully claimed vast powers in each of these prior instances because there existed an undeniable system-threatening crisis

That standard places a heavy burden on anyone wishing to make the case for an emergency government in times when the parallels are not self-evident. History demonstrates that Americans will voluntarily divest themselves of their constitutional rights to contest policy, accepting their president’s unilateral direction, if and when they sense that it is the only viable way ahead. Many, for example, who objected bitterly to Bush v. Gore in 2000 found themselves willingly moved to embrace the president’s success after 9/11. An absence of that signature, broad-based rallying to the president’s side is a pretty good sign that objective conditions do not merit a departure from normal constitutional practices.

Second, although leadership regimes in the United States have always meant expanded empowerment of the presidency, Congress has never completely disappeared—as it effectively has in 2025. When Lincoln’s Congress finally reconvened for an emergency session on July 4, 1861, the president fully briefed it on what he had done and appealed for confirmation of his prior acts, which it provided retroactively. A joint committee then monitored Lincoln’s conduct of the war, intently. The president later rolled up his sleeves for grueling personal lobbying on behalf of constitutional amendments needed to legitimize his revised war aims.

Wilson worked like a prime minister, hand-in-glove with Congress, to enact the legal structures necessary to conduct the war and to create a security apparatus on the home front. Although FDR is recalled as a commanding presence in Washington, Congress refused to stop doing what it thought best. It frequently forced FDR to accept or refute what it did on its own initiative, culminating in an astonishing 635 presidential vetoes (a quarter of the entire lot in American history). A friendly Congress also denied FDR the right to pack the Supreme Court, demonstrating that a crucial part of the legislative power during emergency governments is the policing of the expanded boundaries of presidential conduct to ensure that the dictatorship remains constitutional. This boundary-patrolling role was an active feature of Congress during both the Cold War and the Bush 43 years, notwithstanding the trends favoring presidential power.

But the third lesson may be the most important today. In every one of these past episodes, the nation’s constitutional dictatorships neither endured nor did they simply dwindle away. Rather they were terminated, abruptly.

Andrew Johnson was impeached. Woodrow Wilson suffered the humiliating rejection of his signature League of Nations. Harry Truman’s postwar interval, according to one biographer, “broke about his head with thunder, lightning, hail, rain, sleet, dead cats, howls, tantrums, and palpitations of panic. The storm of war had passed. But the turbulence in its wake . . . all but capsized the Truman administration.”⁴ And the political gales of the post-Cold War era created the dynamic for Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

In every one of these past episodes, the nation’s constitutional dictatorships neither endured nor did they simply dwindle away. Rather they were terminated, abruptly

Common to all these episodes was a specific pivot point: a profound about-face in Congress.

In the entire run of American history, a president has lost both chambers of Congress in a single midterm only six times. Five are postwar, restoration elections: 1918, 1946, 1954, 1994, and 2006.⁵ Precipitous change was made by the very same electorates that shortly before had enabled vigorous presidents by granting them compliant congressional majorities.

Accordingly, for those despairing that our political order today is at risk of being permanently altered, there is a robust history of political correction, of voters taking matters into their own hands after perceived emergencies have been met, posting to Washington swarms of legislators committed to restoring the balance of power after a holiday from regular order. Might those same forces, deployed in earlier years against conventionally enlarged crisis presidencies, also be used to downsize a presidency swelled mainly through the force of his own will? We shall see.

It seems unlikely at this writing that President Donald Trump will experience a full partisan reversal in 2026. But the history of institutional contraction should concentrate our attention on that coming event, as a warning to this White House and as a beacon of hope for those who seek what Warren Harding called, after World War I, a “return to normalcy.” Harding’s anodyne public image too easily masks the crushing force that these elections may impose on presidencies judged by American voters as too big to endure.

Endnotes

Riley is the Miller Center’s White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions and codirects the Presidential Oral History Program.

1.

Quoted in Logan Beirne, Blood of Tyrants: George Washington and the Forging of the Presidency (New York: Encounter, 2013), 147.

2.

Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm.

3.

Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (London: Routledge, 2002).

4.

Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977), 107.

5.

The 1866 and 1974 midterms also produced congresses famously intent on restoring legislative powers but without the double partisan reversals seen in these other five instances.