Emergencies can be national in scope and existential in impact (like the Civil War, which prompted Lincoln to take emergency measures including suspending Habeas Corpus (parenthetically, now that Bill Clinton has eviscerated The Great Writ, no one would bother to formally suspend its operation), or geographically and temporally limited, if profound in impact (Katrina).

They have several characteristics common to all, however.

They are within the discretion of the appropriate executive to declare. (eg, a governor or ....a President).

They suspend the normal operation of political and police power.

They bring into primacy on a national level, one agency: FEMA.

*Historically, the left has sounded the tocsin of alarm when FEMA's supravening role has been bruited as the solution to some long festering social alienation.

That said, and conceding that I have in the past made extravagant suggestions vis-a-vis Presidential use of FEMA as a vehicle to carry forward policies sure to be thwarted by his political enemies, are we not in an unemployment emergency?

And does not our decaying infrastructure pose an immanent threat of death or injury to multitudes of innocent Americans, the impact of which were it the objective of a terrorist threat would certainly be widely seen as justifying, nay demanding, vigorous, even strenuous executive action?

Put differently, given a President willing to reach out and snuff anyone, citizen or not, in an extrajudicial killing via predator hellfire missile, one willing to defy existing law on the use of war powers, why cavil at a little domestic over reaching to save the economy?

Argue, then, if you will, why President Obama should not, in his upcoming jobs  speech, declare an infrastructure emergency requiring that FEMA take over all state highway and building functions, with concommitant firing up the printing press to permit nationalization of the state highway budgets, and wholesale hiring of the unemployed to avert the undeniable danger of bridge collapse, pothole vehicle swallowing, and levy failure.  The House will impeach, you say?  Big deal, sez I--the Senate will not convict.

Go long, Prez, go long.  What have you got to lose?

* the FBI “continued to evade the will of Congress, partly with Justice Department approval, by maintaining a secret administrative index of suspects for round-up in case of a national emergency.” The FBI will maintian control of the list until 1985, when it will be transferred to FEMA

*