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After the United States entered into a war against Japan, many Americans feared that Japanese Americans living on the West Coast might engage in subversive activities, especially if there were a bombing raid or an invasion. In addition to racial prejudice, there was a widespread belief that persons of Japanese background in Hawaii had helped prepare for the invasion of Pearl Harbor. At the urging of military and political leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in early 1942 issued Executive Order No. 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to prescribe “military areas” from which any civilians might be excluded, and Executive Order No. 9102, establishing an executive agency for the purpose of interning the estimated 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, citizens and noncitizens alike. Soon thereafter, the Congress enacted a statute implementing the executive orders.

The War Powers Act (formally the War Powers Resolution) was an effort by Congress to regain lost influence in U.S. military policy. Specifically, the act, passed on November 7, 1973, over a veto by President Richard M. Nixon, established certain requirements for the president to meet and follow when acting to deploy military forces in a hostile environment. No president has ever accepted the act as a legitimate constraint on the presidential war powers. Still, presidents in most circumstances have followed the form, if not the spirit, of the act’s reporting requirements. Despite protracted political and academic debates as to the law’s constitutionality, the Supreme Court has never ruled directly on that issue.

Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to tax and spend for the common defense, to declare war, to raise and support armies and a navy, and to make rules for the government of such forces. The Constitution (Article II, section 2) makes the president commander in chief and gives him or her the power to make treaties and appoint ambassadors with the advice and consent of the Senate. Although Congress has the power to declare war, from the nation’s beginnings, presidents have claimed the authority to place military troops abroad and to wage war. The United States has been involved in only five declared wars: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1917-1918), and World War II (1941-1945). Of those, only the War of 1812 was actively debated by Congress before a formal declaration of war was made. Nevertheless, military troops have been deployed more than two hundred times in various military actions abroad.

Wartime seizure power may be directed at both foreign and domestic property. Although substantial resources are available to redirect the nation’s economy in support of armed conflict or national defense, Congress passed a number of statutes penalizing private businesses or persons for failure to cooperate. The most important provisions are in the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917), the Selective Service Act (1940), the Atomic Energy Act (1946), and the Defense Production Act (1950). Both Presidents Trump and Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to increase the manufacture of critical medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020.

The War Powers Act of 1973 emerged as an effort to limit the power of the U.S. executive to make or declare war without congressional authorization before committing American forces overseas. Under Article I, section 8, of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has the right to declare war and raise troops, but Article II, section 2, states that the president acts as commander in chief. The division of powers between the legislative and executive branches became blurred with the outbreak of World War II and the escalation of the Cold War throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. Congress wanted more cooperation between the executive and legislative branches in determining foreign policy decisions as the Vietnam conflict progressed.

War and censorship are forms of state activity that have been closely connected for three reasons. First, the goal of censorship is to control what is thought and said. War encourages intense social controls in order to promote unity in facing an enemy. Second, after one side wins a war, censorship is one of the ways in which the victor can establish supremacy by forcing its own ideas on the loser and by suppressing dissent within the losing population. Third, states at war have used censorship to keep secrets about strategy and weaponry from being made available to their enemies. War

SIGNIFICANCE: Martial law is a special condition during a state of emergency, not a body of laws and regulations as in civil law and military law, and the military’s authority under martial law is never absolute.

The Defense Production Act of 1950 is a law passed in the United States during the Korean War. The law was meant to help the country have the items it needed to protect itself, specifically during war. The bill allowed the US president to require companies to prioritize government contracts for producing items that are necessary for national defense. The government could use the powers of the law during wartime or another national emergency.

The National Emergencies Act is a federal law passed in the United States in 1976 confirming a number of executive branch powers related to national emergencies. The powers referred to in this act include the 136 emergency powers defined within the US Code of Law. The act allowed the president of the United States to use certain special powers in the event of a national emergency but limited the scope and number of executive powers a president could invoke during an emergency declaration. The act was meant to impose a system of checks and balances on the president's emergency powers. It was signed into law by President Gerald Ford. Since its passage, every president has declared at least one national emergency while in office, totaling over eighty national emergencies declared under the law. More than forty of these declared emergencies have been renewed annually since being activated and remain in effect.