Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) recently introduced a proposal to cancel the declaration of a national emergency made first by George W. Bush and then expanded by Barack Obama that covers political chaos and violence that’s been seen in the African country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She got… one cosponsor (Arizona’s Paul Gosar).
The actual text of Boebert’s proposal provides no justification for cancelling the presidential declarations of emergency, which have been furthered on a roughly yearly basis. The last occasion on which President Joe Biden formally outlined the latest one-year expansion of the formal declaration of an emergency was last October. The text of that notification from the president referenced “the unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States constituted by the situation in or in relation to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been marked by widespread violence and atrocities that continue to threaten regional stability.”
It appears as though actually implementing the cancellation of these past declarations of emergency, which in general terms provide a foundation for issuing economic restrictions with the aim of securing certain political or security ends, would need the president’s signature. Unsurprisingly, there’s no particular indication that President Joe Biden would be interested in rushing to sign off on a proposal to upend the legal framework by which U.S. authorities have been able to respond to that violence in southern Africa with punitive economic measures.
There have recently been other proposals to roughly this same effect from the same corner of the House GOP that target other presidential declarations of emergency, and it’s remarkable for the MAGAts to apparently come out swinging so strongly against the usage of this presidential authority, considering their own guy used similar mechanisms when in office to try and secure the support needed for his wall at the country’s southern border.
