Excerpt from Trading With the Enemy: Legislative and Executive Documents Concerning Regulation of International Transactions in Time of Declared National Emergency An exhaustive 2-year study by the Special Committee, followed by extensive consideration by the appropriate legislative committees of each house, has produced the National Emergencies Act, which was Signed into law by the President on September 14, 197 6 (public Law 94 The act terminates all powers and authorities possessed by the executive branch as a result of any declaration of national emer gency, and prescribes procedures governing the declaration, conduct, and termination Of any future national emergency. Exempted, how ever, from the National Emergencies Act are certain laws deemed especially important to the functioning of the government. Among these is section 5 b) of the Trading With the Enemy Act. Given the jurisdiction of the Committee on International Relations under the Rules of the House, it is the responsibility of the committee and its Subcommittee on International Trade and Commerce, pur suant to Section 502 of the National Emergencies Act, to conduct a thorough review of section 5 (b) of the Trading With the Enemy Act and to recommend revisions to the House within 9 months. Two problems arise in attempting to determine congressional intent with regard to section 5(b). The first is that the legislative history of 5(b) is short and sketchy. There was virtually no discussion Of it at the time of the passage of the original Trading With the Enemy Act, and subsequent amendments generally occurred in times of crisis when apparently it was felt that there was no time for the luxury of extensive debate. The most striking example is that the 1933 amend ment, which authorized the President to invoke the powers of. 5(b) simply by declaring a national emergency, was debated and passed by both houses in 1 day, without hearings and before the bill was even in print. The second is that the relationship of 5 (b) to the rest of the Trading With the Enemy Act was ambiguous from the beginning, in that there was no language in that section limiting its application to the enemy in time of war as defined in section 2 of the act. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.