John Whitehead's Commentary
The Constitution Has Gone AWOL: From Presidential Power Grabs to Martial Law [SHORT]

That didn’t take long.
Within days of Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights disappeared from the White House’s website.
While the Trump Administration insists the removal of these foundational documents will eventually be restored to the site, the timing and symbolism of their removal is hard to ignore. Especially in light of the flurry of executive orders issued by President Trump as a means of bypassing the very rule of law those documents were intended to ensure.
Already, Trump has unilaterally declared two national states of emergency, announced his intention to disregard the 14th Amendment’s assurance of birthright citizenship, established two new government agencies, and pushed for an expansion of the death penalty.
So much for the Founders’ efforts to guard against this kind of concentrated, absolute power by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches to ensure that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government.
Mind you, Trump is not unique in his use of executive orders to bypass Congress and unilaterally impose his will upon the nation, but it is indicative of the fact that he, like his predecessors, will continue to serve as an imperial president, using executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
America, meet your latest dictator-in-chief.
Be warned: what is happening right now is political theater. Allow yourself to be distracted by it, and you will miss the real power play afoot: the expansion of unaccountable presidential power that exposes us to constitutional peril.
The Deep State is counting on us to be distracted.
Don’t fall for it.
We must be particularly leery when political promises to fix everything that is wrong with the nation are dependent on presidential power grabs and manufactured crises.
That’s the oldest trick in the book.
Whether the ends justify the means is never the point.
It is especially when the ends seem to justify the means that one must tread with particular caution.
That’s how we landed in this mess in the first place.
Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
As a result, we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.
That indefinite state of crisis has remained constant, no matter which party has controlled Congress and the White House.
The seeds of this present madness were sown almost two decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”
Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”
Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.
We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.
As we have witnessed in recent years, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.
Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.
Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.
So, too, every action taken by the current occupant of the White House and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government makes us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.
This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.
As an investigative report by the Brennan Center explains:
“There are currently 41 declared national emergencies, most of which have been in place for more than a decade… Some of the emergency powers Congress has made available to the president are so breathtaking in their vastness that they would make an autocrat do a spit take. Presidents can use emergency declarations to shut down communications infrastructure, freeze private assets without judicial process, control domestic transportation, or even suspend the prohibition on government testing of chemical and biological agents on unwitting human subjects.”
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
We must recalibrate the balance of power.
For starters, Congress should put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.
At a minimum, as The Washington Post suggests, “all emergency declarations [s]hould expire automatically after three or six months.”
We’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.
WC: 1098
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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