Congress Never Reclaims a Power It Once Lent Out

On July 6, 1798, John Adams signed a bill in a Philadelphia summer so wet with heat that congressmen fainted on the floor of Congress Hall, and the bill he signed gave the president the power to detain or deport, without trial, any citizen of a nation the United States was fighting. France was the nation in question. Nobody in the room expected the law to outlive the war scare with France, which ended within two years. It did not occur to them that it might outlive the century, or that a president in 2025 would reach for the same statute against a Venezuelan street gang and win the argument in front of a federal appeals court.

That law is one of five below, each a power Congress handed the presidency during a genuine emergency, each still on the books decades or centuries after the emergency passed.

The ranking isn't by how frightening each power sounds. It's by how completely the "temporary" stopped meaning anything — how far each one has drifted from the crisis that justified it toward becoming ordinary furniture of the executive branch, invoked routinely, by both parties, without anyone in the building particularly noticing.

The fair case against this whole exercise deserves a hearing first. Several of these statutes contain sunset language and renewal requirements precisely so Congress could let them lapse — the National Emergencies Act demands an annual renewal vote for a reason. Presidents of both parties have used these tools for genuinely useful things, freezing assets of hostile regimes, moving fast when fast mattered. Congress retains the theoretical power to repeal any of the five tomorrow, by majority vote, at any hour it chooses. The tools aren't the problem, this argument goes; the muscle to use the recall lever is what atrophied, and that's a separate story from the design of the lever itself. It's a fair point, and it survives about as long as it takes to check how often that lever actually gets pulled.

5. The Selective Service Act

Every American man still registers at eighteen, a legal requirement carried forward from the 1948 peacetime draft law, itself descended from the 1917 wartime act. No one has been drafted since 1973. The registration requirement survived a 1980 political fight, a 2016 push to add women that stalled in committee, and five decades of a volunteer force that never needed it. It sits lowest here because it's the one power Congress could genuinely let die tomorrow with nobody in the Pentagon objecting. Dormant, not embedded — the distinction matters, and it's the only entry where it still holds.

4. The War Powers Resolution

Congress passed this one in 1973, over Nixon's veto, specifically to claw back war-making authority it had let slip away. Every president since has treated it as a formality: notify Congress within forty-eight hours, describe the action as "consistent with" the Resolution's spirit, keep fighting. Obama's Libya campaign in 2011 ran past the sixty-day withdrawal clock with no consequence beyond a strongly worded letter. The law meant to reverse a delegation of power became, instead, a permission slip presidents sign themselves.

3. The National Emergencies Act

Passed in 1976 to force presidents to formally declare emergencies and let Congress terminate them by vote, it instead produced a standing catalogue of them. Roughly forty national emergencies are active as of this writing, the oldest declared November 14, 1979, over the Iran hostage crisis, and renewed by every president since without interruption — including several who normalized relations with the country the emergency was declared against. I checked the renewal dates myself one afternoon, which tells you something about how I spend afternoons. The termination mechanism Congress built into the law has been used exactly once.

2. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act

IEEPA passed in 1977 to replace the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, narrowing presidential authority to freeze assets and impose sanctions specifically on foreign adversaries during a declared emergency. In 2025 it became the legal foundation for a sweeping tariff regime on countries with no emergency relationship to the United States beyond running a trade surplus, a use of the statute that ended up before the Supreme Court within the year. Tariffs are, under the Constitution's plain text, a power assigned to Congress. IEEPA has become the route around that assignment for two administrations running now, of different parties, which is the detail that should worry anyone who thinks this is a partisan complaint.

1. The Alien Enemies Act

The oldest of the five, unrepealed since 1798, and the only one drafted for a war that ended before Adams left office. It has been invoked four times in 228 years — the War of 1812, both world wars, and 2025, when it was used to deport alleged gang members without the individual hearings ordinary immigration law requires, over litigation that reached federal appellate courts within months. No other statute on this list has survived from the founding generation into active use in a case still working through the courts as this piece goes to print. It sits at number one because it is the cleanest specimen: a power built for one crisis, dormant for a century, alive again, unchanged.

None of the five was written to last. Adams didn't expect his law to see 1812, let alone 2026; the authors of the 1976 act thought an annual vote would end things nobody wanted to keep. What they built instead was a set of levers nobody pulls, sitting exactly where the last emergency left them, waiting for the next administration that needs one.