More than just push and use the laws already in place, with the legislative branch new laws could be passed in favor of restoring and maintaining power inequality in the presidency’s favor.
Relying on the law of inertia - prevalent in bureaucracies - it would be very unlikely that a change in majority – regardless of branch – would result in any repealing of these changes.
These two methods – passing new laws and setting precedents for what the executive branch could do and how laws could be interpreted – made gradual changes to the rules of the political game with the quality to last beyond any change in regime.
All this had to be done with utmost secrecy.
Not so much because the men with the plan feared the US public. With the compliance of the majority of the representatives and senators it was very unlikely that anyone would ever make it an enough heated issue to generate any significant amount of public attention and emotion.
Furthermore, the abstract and legal nature at the center of this coup, made it inherently beyond most people’s frame of interest and understanding even if some driven elected representative had decided to make a go for it.
It was simply not something suitable to make a run for office on.
It was also not the kind of stuff that would make the corporate media interested. It would require expensive and extensive research and writing to make much sense and even then it would not be the stuff of selling headlines.
Instead, the people needed to keep in the dark was individuals working within the executive branch and its’ agencies who did not have the political and ideological perceptions that would make them agree well with what was underway and had the capacity to put the pieces together.
This fear was well founded. These people turned out to be the ones that would blow the whistle, leak information, and drop hints.
However, that would not happen for some time.
No matter how many gradual changes were made, however, it was with 9/11 that the prefect storm occurred.
"Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."
Regardless of constitutional interpretation and opinion about the relationship between the branches of the US government, it is clear that when the nation is at war, the executive power has more free reins than at any other time. Foreign policy is primarily the domain of the executive branch, and during military aggression and defense against external forces foreign policy has a tendency to take precedence over other areas of national governing. It becomes hard to challenge any requests or decisions that can be motivated by the defense of the nation, especially when there is a clear and stated intention to view all such challenges – and any questioning – as unpatriotic and as siding with the enemy.
It is almost par of the course to find that during war, things that would otherwise be hard to view as part of the defense of the nation, are claimed by the executive branch – and its’ congressional supporters - as things related to foreign policy and necessary to win the war.
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