[palmotea]

> Facts are still different than opinions, that statute doesn't give him unchecked power to declare any crazy idea as fact.

I don't know about the president, but IIRC, juries have a quite wide latitude decide what facts they find ("In Anglo-American–based legal systems, a finding of fact made by the jury is not appealable unless clearly wrong to any reasonable person", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trier_of_fact).

Saying "whenever the President shall find as a fact" seems like it's giving the president the authority to determine what the "facts" are, and not putting any conditions on how he does that or subjecting them to second-guessing.

[ajross]

No, it's precisely the opposite. The choice of that term isn't to empower the president, it's to clarify that such a decision is a "fact" in the legal sense and thus subject to judicial review. In point of fact the page you link says explicitly that courts (and not the executive branch) are the government organ responsible for determining facts.