(Page 43 of 43) - War, Emergency and Corruption After September 11 authored by Meyers, Peter.

Cite Immigration Act of February 5, 1917.
[note about the specificity of anti-German feeling and the domestic tensions it created...]
The Emergency Immigration Act = An act to limit the immigration of aliens into the United
States...May 19, 1921 (67 P.L. 5; 67 Cong. Ch. 8; 42 Stat. 5). This was followed by the comprehensive
legislation of 1924.... “Quota law”...cite..
[immigration figures based on official historical statistics from 2003 yearbook....] That immigration
continues to be seen in terms of emergency...cf. “Immigration Emergency Powers...” Senate
committee sept. 30 1982...call number Y 4.J 89/2:J-97-147
44 Stat. 577. [see 45 U.S.C. 151 et seq.]
For statutes in the period of the Great Depression preceding the election of F.D.R., see for example
Joint resolution to provide additional appropriations for the Department of Justice for the fiscal year
1930 to cover certain emergencies... December 20, 1929 (71 Pub. Res. 28; 71 Cong. Ch. 10; 46 Stat.
52); An act to provide emergency financing facilities for financial institutions, to aid in financing
agriculture, commerce, and industry, and for other purposes.... January 22, 1932 (72 P.L. 2; 72 Cong.
Ch. 8; 47 Stat. 5); the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932, An act to relieve destitution, to
broaden the lending powers of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and to create employment by
providing for and expediting a public-works program... July 21, 1932 (72 P.L. 302; 72 Cong. Ch. 520;
47 Stat. 709).
These two diary entries are cited at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWarmistice.htm.
Silver (2004) provides a recent perspicuous approach to this idea as concerns the last century in
America.
Corwin (1947:5)
Corwin (1947:4).
[[Consideration of emergency power has often been conducted under the rubric of “the exception.” I
do not find this convincing for the following reasons: 1) only the myth of the law as a total and closed
system makes convincing the language of “inside” and “outside”; 2) sometimes this myth and this
language is useful, sometimes it is not; 3) in either case, it is not fundamental; 4) if “exception” just
means “where judgement reigns,” one wants to know where, in real life, judgment is not operative (I do
not refer here to “good judgement,” which is another story altogether); 4) if judgment is widespread,
the notion of “the exception” has little specific purchase; 5) if “the exception” is where politics occurs,
the Constitution itself structures some questions as political, and therefore “the exception” is, to some
extent, inside the system; 6) one may want to say that the “outside” has been imported into the system,
but that misrepresents both the genealogy of the Constitution and the practice of it; 7) the basic notion
of “divided powers” is an embrace of politics within the legal “framework” (that is, it is the creation of
an open rather than a closed system); 8) unless one reduces “the exception” to judgment — why not
then just call it “judgment”? — it is likewise misleading to assert that politics is fundamentally about
“exceptions” when it is really about conflict — in which you had better exercise judgment; 9) that is,
conflict may or may not be an exception, but all exceptions are not conflicts; 10) the assertion of “the
exception” is always a rhetorical-strategic move in a particular situation, it is not an ontological fact;
11) such assertions are part of politics; 12) politics is never monadic, but always composite; 13) the
composition of politics always includes some things that are continuous with the past and norms and
some things that are not continuous, i.e. exceptions to the past; 14) neither is possible without the other,
neither is determinative; 15) law and society are one thing, not two, especially in the United States.]
[here and below: emergency powers are not only, or even primarily, police powers; they are simply,
with respect to the American system, unchecked powers; they bear heavily on the market; they shift the
sliding scale of what counts as corruption.]
[note here on raison d’état traditions, Machiavelli, Naudé etc. Comment on Scheppele on one side and
Boltanski & Thévenot on the other. Touch on Burke. Etc. Finish with Agambin. I do not accept the
philo-philosophical way of making a comparable point — “the exception has become the norm” —
because, returning us to the model of undivided action, it fails to account for the real operation of
political culture.]