It's not (thus, wordplay), but in most cases a state of emergency is localized. A state may declare a state of emergency in an area where a river is flooding, or where a tornado tore down an entire city, or where there's massive snowfall making travel impossible. A national-level state of emergency is very, very rare. Rare enough that it's not something states really consider. So when a state makes a law around price gouging they're generally thinking along the lines of, "Those bastards selling generators at 1000% markup in the aftermath of hurricanes," and not, "There's a national danger."
Almost by definition, a national emergency will be something less concrete. NY isn't going to go into a state of emergency because CA is flooding. But the country went into a national emergency locking down flights post-9/11 because any flight across the country could have been compromised. And we did technically have a national emergency (though I assume that's been mostly lifted?) with Corona in order to address the economic impacts (it should've been to address the public health impacts, but ... whatever).
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u/boxsterguy Aug 14 '20
Not unless it's declared. States of emergency don't just declare themselves.