There’s little that President Donald Trump loves more than an emergency — or, more precisely, declaring an emergency. A formal pronouncement that we are under attack — by immigrants, by protesters, by economic conditions, by whatever a paranoid mind might conjure — can carry political benefits. Fear rarely fails, and Trump has a knack for taking the winning side of those 80/20 issues . And, legally, an emergency declaration can unlock fringe-extreme executive powers. But over the past few weeks, the federal courts have drawn a line. Not everything bad is an emergency, it turns out.

When Trump went on a tariff bender this past spring, his advisers plumbed the law books and came up with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Trump declared that “large and persi

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