In late spring of 2019, the Trump White House issued a fear-mongering statement about the “sustained influx of illegal aliens” on America’s Southern border. Its contents, needless to say, were xenophobic nonsense from start to finish. Noteworthy, however, was the way it invoked the language of emergency to justify the cruel and brutal measures the administration was hell-bent on pursuing. In this case, such language also carried the force of law: Trump invoking emergency legislation, and not for the first time, to broaden his powers of action.

The president’s abuse of emergency legislation, however, got progressive lawmakers wondering how it might be used constructively. In that spirit, Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon partnered with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce the Climate Emergency Resolution: a simple declaration recognizing the scope and urgency of the climate crisis. As a resolution facing a Republican-controlled Senate and White House, the declaration was more of a symbolic effort than a legislative one.

But with both now flipped to the Democrats, Sanders, AOC, Blumenauer, and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon have decided to give the initiative some teeth in the form of a bill calling for President Biden to declare a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act. Under the act, a sitting president has discretionary authority to deem something a national emergency — a decision that enables them to draw on nearly 140 statutes and dramatically expand the potential scope of federal government action across a wide range of areas. The administration’s room to maneuver and (if it saw fit) take aggressive action would, in effect, be massively increased. As the Center for Biological Diversity pointed out in a statement endorsing the bill, declaring a national emergency would allow the president to, among other things, “redirect military funds to build clean energy systems, marshal private industry for clean technology manufacturing, generate millions of high-quality jobs and finally put an end to dangerous crude oil exports.”