The International Emergency Economic Powers Act: Origins, Evolution, and Use
and in particular this part -
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The Efforts of Congress to Limit Executive Emergency Authorities
By the mid-1970s, following U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, revelations of domestic spying, assassinations of foreign political leaders, the Watergate break-in, and other related abuses of power, Congress increasingly focused on checking the executive branch. The Senate formed a bipartisan special committee chaired by Senators Frank Church and Charles Mathias to reevaluate delegations of emergency authority to the President.47 The special committee issued a report surveying the President's emergency powers in which it asserted that the United States had technically "been in a state of national emergency since March 9, 1933" and that there were four distinct declarations of national emergency in effect.48 The report also noted that the United States had "on the books at least 470 significant emergency statutes without time limitations delegating to the Executive extensive discretionary powers, ordinarily exercised by the Legislature, which affect the lives of American citizens in a host of all-encompassing ways."49
In the course of the Committee's investigations, Senator Mathias, a committee co-chair, noted, "A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency government." Senator Church, the other co-chair, said the central question before the committee was "whether it [was] possible for a democratic government such as ours to exist under its present Constitution and system of three separate branches equal in power under a continued state of emergency."50
Among the more controversial statutes highlighted by the committee was TWEA. In 1977, during the House markup of a bill revising TWEA, Representative Jonathan Bingham, Chairperson of the House International Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Economic Policy, described TWEA as conferring "on the President what could have been dictatorial powers that he could have used without any restraint by Congress."51 According to the Department of Justice, TWEA granted the President four major groups of powers in a time of war or other national emergency:
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So it was done to "fix" an earlier law - Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917, which came about as a result of WW1.
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