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."
Moreover, it doesn't even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because "it is a President's action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance."
In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office's list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.
All of the imperial powers amassed by past presidents-- 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 passed from Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden and will be passed along to the next president.
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.
These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.
So you see, the Supreme Court didn't make the president a dictator. It merely confirmed what we've been warning about all along: the president is already an imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional dictator with permanent powers.
Absolute power absolutely corrupted the presidency.
As for Trump, his concept of power, immunity and the presidency has always been troubling, self-serving and corrupt.
For instance, in 2016, Trump bragged, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?"
In 2019, Trump declared, "I have to the right to do whatever I want as president."
And in 2023, Trump promised if he were reelected to only be a dictator on "day one."
Any presidential candidate who promises to be a dictator on day one will be a dictator-in-chief for life. The government does not voluntarily relinquish those powers once it acquires, uses and inevitably abuses them.
As political science professor Gene Sharp warned, "Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones."
Which brings me back to the Supreme Court's ruling on July 1, 2024, which was handed down mere days before the nation celebrates the anniversary of its declaration of independence from the heavy-handed tyranny of King George.
A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all-- our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor-- "because they sought to free the American people from the reign of a dictatorial British emperor and believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.
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