Then again, the police state with the president at its helm has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.
The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts"powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler"empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.
As law professor William P. Marshall explains, "every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents."
All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush"to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability"were inherited by Donald Trump and passed along to Joe Biden.
These presidential powers"acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president"enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d'e'tat.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
Unfortunately, the process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with "we the people."
For starters, as I make clear in my book 'Battlefield America: The War on the American People' and in its fictional counterpart 'The Erik Blair Diaries', we must recalibrate the balance of power.
Start locally"in your own communities, in your schools, at your city council meetings, in newspaper editorials, at protests"by pushing back against laws that are unjust, police departments that overreach, politicians that don't listen to their constituents, and a system of government that grows more tyrannical by the day.
What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution's principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they - the President, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats, and bureaucrats, "answer to" and are "accountable to" - "we the people."
In other words, we've got to start making both the President and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.
John W Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
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