The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether the government may search the digital contents of Americans’ cell phones at the border and international airports without first providing a valid reason and obtaining a warrant.

The federal government has long exercised broad authority to conduct searches at the nation’s international borders and airports. Historically, that authority has been tied to the government’s responsibility to regulate entry into the United States, enforce customs laws and prevent contraband from being brought into the country.

Modern technology, however, has complicated the constitutional assumptions underlying that traditional rule.

A suitcase contains a finite collection of physical items that a traveler chooses to carry. A modern smartphone can contain years of private communications, photographs, financial records, medical information, internet activity, location histories and other sensitive information. It can provide a detailed record of where a person has been, whom that person communicates with, what he or she reads, purchases and searches for, and, in some instances, information relating to activities inside the home.

That distinction is at the center of Anibowei v. Blanche, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to review the constitutionality of warrantless cell phone searches at international borders and airports. In calling on the Court to affirm that the government must obtain a warrant before searching the digital contents of Americans’ electronic devices at an international border, The Rutherford Institute argues that applying a doctrine developed for searches of physical goods and luggage to modern smartphones goes far beyond the purpose of the border-search exception and fails to account for the extraordinary privacy interests implicated by digital devices.

The Border-Search Exception

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Ordinarily, government officials must obtain a warrant by proving to an independent judicial officer that there is probable cause evidence of a particular crime will be found before conducting a search that intrudes upon constitutionally protected privacy interests. Courts have nevertheless recognized exceptions to that general requirement, including a longstanding exception for searches conducted at international borders.

The border-search exception developed from the government’s sovereign authority to control what and who enters the country. The Supreme Court has historically tied that authority to such interests as preventing contraband from being smuggled into the United States and enforcing customs laws.

Those historical justifications make intuitive sense when officials are inspecting luggage, vehicles, cargo and other physical items crossing the border.

The difficulty arises when the same doctrine is applied to electronic devices of Americans returning home.

Digital information also does not cross a border in the same manner as physical contraband. Data may be stored locally on a device, remotely on servers, or in some combination of the two. Current CBP policy limits border searches to information resident on the device and prohibits officers from using the device to access information stored solely in the cloud. That limitation itself illustrates the imperfect fit between traditional border-search principles and digital information: identical information may be subject to inspection if downloaded to a phone but beyond the scope of a border search if stored only remotely.

Rutherford Institute’s brief argues that a rule permitting routine warrantless searches of phones therefore bears an increasingly weak relationship to the historical purposes that justified the border-search exception in the first place. Moreover, requiring a warrant for the digital contents of a phone would not leave government agents unable to respond to genuine emergencies. Existing Fourth Amendment doctrines already recognize exceptions for exigent circumstances, including situations involving the imminent destruction of evidence, the pursuit of a fleeing suspect or an immediate threat to safety.

The Anibowei Case

George Anibowei is an immigration attorney whose cell phone contains confidential communications with clients, including individuals involved in removal proceedings adverse to the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the court filings, federal agents have repeatedly searched Anibowei’s phone five different times when he returned to the United States from international travel. During the first search, agents copied the data stored on his phone, which the government continues to retain according to the cert petition. The repeated searches have affected how Anibowei travels, leading him to leave his work phone behind when traveling internationally. The border-search exception likewise affects how many attorneys, journalists, and others with confidential or privileged information stored on their phones travel.

The Fifth Circuit has held that basic or manual cell phone searches at the border do not require a warrant, while an advanced or forensic search using external equipment to copy or analyze a device’s contents requires, at most, merely reasonable suspicion rather than a warrant. In Anibowei’s case, the appeals court concluded that its existing precedent foreclosed his Fourth Amendment challenge.

The Rutherford Institute is asking the Supreme Court to review that approach.

The issue extends well beyond a single attorney or a single border encounter. In fiscal year 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection conducted 55,318 searches of electronic devices at ports of entry, an increase of more than 30 percent over the number conducted in 2023. Americans also make more than 100 million international trips annually.

As the number of electronic-device searches increases, the constitutional question becomes increasingly significant: how much access should the government have to the private digital information carried by American travelers who have done nothing more than cross an international border?

Why Cell Phones Are Constitutionally Different

The Supreme Court has already recognized that modern cell phones present privacy concerns unlike those associated with most physical objects.

In Riley v. California, the Court held that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching a cell phone seized during an arrest. The decision rejected the notion that a phone could simply be treated like other physical objects found on an arrested person.

The distinction rests on both the amount and the nature of the information stored on modern devices.

A single smartphone may contain private communications, photographs, health information, financial records, internet history, location data and information generated by dozens of applications. Taken together, those records can reveal a comprehensive picture of an individual’s personal life. The Rutherford Institute’s brief describes modern smartphones as devices capable of providing an unusually detailed account of a person’s communications, movements and activities.

The privacy implications extend beyond information traditionally associated with a telephone.

Health applications may contain medical records and information about sleep, heart rate and physical activity. Financial applications may show banking and spending patterns. Internet histories may reveal personal interests or concerns. Mapping and location applications can document a person’s movements over time. Applications connected to home-security systems can, in some circumstances, contain video or other information originating inside the home.

The Supreme Court confronted related concerns earlier this year in United States v. Chatrie, another case in which The Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief. There, the Court held that government acquisition of certain geofence location data constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Anibowei brief relies in part on that developing body of digital-privacy law in arguing that constitutional protections should not diminish simply because the search takes place at a border.

Using the Border to Investigate Domestic Crimes

The Rutherford Institute’s brief also raises concerns about the ways the border-search exception has been used in investigations unrelated to border security.

Several cases cited in the brief involved law enforcement officers who suspected individuals of ordinary domestic crimes and then used international travel as an opportunity to seize and search their electronic devices.

In one case, agents investigating insurance fraud waited until an American citizen returned from Jamaica before seizing his phone and demanding his password. In another, officers investigating a flight attendant for fraud tracked her international travel and seized her phone and laptop when she returned to the United States. A third case involved officers who waited until a suspect returned from visiting family abroad before searching his phone.

These cases did not principally involve contraband being smuggled across the border or crimes arising from international travel.

Instead, the border supplied an opportunity to conduct searches that otherwise would have been subject to ordinary Fourth Amendment requirements. And under the border-search exception, law enforcement agents do not even have to be investigating or have suspicion of a particular crime to search your phone.

This illustrates the danger of treating the border-search exception as a categorical authorization to inspect digital devices as well. A doctrine justified by the government’s need to regulate the physical border can become, in practice, a mechanism for avoiding the warrant requirement.

The Fourth Amendment’s Protection of “Papers and Effects”

The constitutional question also implicates the text and history of the Fourth Amendment.

The Amendment specifically protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Although smartphones did not exist when the Bill of Rights was adopted, constitutional protections are not limited to the technology available in the eighteenth century.

The Rutherford Institute argues that modern phones implicate nearly every category identified in the Fourth Amendment because they aggregate information once kept separately in homes, correspondence, records and personal possessions.

A smartphone can contain private communications that once would have existed as letters; financial information once maintained in ledgers; maps and travel records once kept on paper; and personal writings once maintained in journals or diaries.

The brief therefore argues that electronic devices should not receive less constitutional protection merely because those traditional “papers and effects” have migrated into digital form.

That argument also reflects the historical concerns that gave rise to the Fourth Amendment.

The Founding generation was deeply familiar with general warrants and writs of assistance, which gave government officials broad discretion to search private property for evidence. The Fourth Amendment was intended, in significant part, to impose limits on that kind of generalized governmental rummaging.

The capacity of a modern smartphone to consolidate vast amounts of personal information makes those historical concerns particularly relevant. A search of a single electronic device may reveal information that once would have required access to a person’s home, correspondence, financial records, photographs and other possessions.

The form of the information has changed. The underlying constitutional interest in protecting private papers and effects from unrestricted government inspection has not.

What the Supreme Court Is Being Asked to Decide

Anibowei presents a broader question about how established Fourth Amendment rules should apply when traditional search exceptions encounter technologies capable of revealing unprecedented amounts of personal information.

The government retains substantial authority to regulate the nation’s borders. The issue is whether that authority should permit warrantless access to the digital contents of an American traveler’s phone without regard to the fundamentally different privacy interests involved.

The Rutherford Institute maintains that it should not.

The Institute has asked the Supreme Court to grant review and clarify that the border-search exception does not provide blanket authority to search Americans’ electronic devices without a warrant. Where genuine emergencies exist, established exceptions to the warrant requirement remain available. But routine international travel, standing alone, should not place the entirety of a person’s digital life outside the Fourth Amendment’s protections.

As more of Americans’ private lives move onto the devices they carry, the answer will determine not only the scope of government authority at the border but also the continuing meaning of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age.

October 1, 2026 • Rutherford Institute Warns: Warrantless Border Searches of Americans’ Cell Phones Circumvents Fourth Amendment

“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.”—Robert Reich

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that undocumented immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024, compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per 100,000. Cato concluded that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

The government is using its so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and constitutional protections can be treated as optional whenever the government invokes security.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

Be warned: the literal and figurative walls being erected in the name of national security should concern the people already living inside them. The machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.

That is how a police state becomes a prison state.

Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.

To round people up on the scale envisioned by the administration, the government first has to know who people are. Where they live. Where they work. Where they drive. Who they associate with. What they look like. What databases contain information about them. Where they were yesterday. Where they are today. And where they might be tomorrow.

That requires surveillance. Lots of it.

Biometric databases. Facial recognition. License-plate readers. Flock cameras. Data brokers. Location tracking. Artificial intelligence. Phone extraction tools. Government databases linked to still more government databases.

The Brennan Center for Justice reports that the Department of Homeland Security has committed more than $2.9 billion in recent years to surveillance, data collection and analytics technologies used in the interior of the United States, including more than $1 billion for biometrics. Those systems include tools capable of tracking phones and vehicles, collecting facial and other biometric data, purchasing commercial information and combining records from multiple databases to create detailed profiles on individuals.

Then comes enforcement, masked agents, raids, checkpoints, detention centers, private prisons, transfers, rendition—all wrapped in the reassuring language of public safety and national security.

For now, immigration is the convenient scapegoat to justify the crackdowns and loss of liberty, but the machinery of oppression being assembled does not know how to discriminate and differentiate.

A surveillance camera does not know whether or not you are a citizen. A license-plate reader does not know how you voted. A biometric database does not care why your face is being searched. A location-tracking system does not distinguish between following an undocumented immigrant and following a political protester.

Indeed, the Brennan Center notes that DHS technologies acquired for border security and criminal investigations have capabilities that can be directed at anyone—immigrants, protesters, travelers and other members of the public.

The machinery simply does what it was built to do: find, track, identify, classify, control and, when ordered, detain.

We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.

Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.

Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.

This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.

Not because every American is about to be deported, but because ICE demonstrates what government looks like when surveillance, databases, aggressive enforcement, detention and secrecy are fused into a single system.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.

This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.

People are already disappearing inside the United States.

Seized without warning, denied due process, and locked up indefinitely in a sprawling network of immigration detention centers, county jails, private prisons, temporary holding facilities and federal facilities, these individuals are being transferred from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, moved hundreds or thousands of miles from family and lawyers, made increasingly difficult to locate—they are being made to disappear.

Their whereabouts are effectively being scrubbed from public view.

On September 15, 2026, ICE stopped publicly listing the locations of many detainees with final removal orders in its online detainee locator.

Immigration attorneys told the Associated Press that clients suddenly vanished from the public system, making it harder to determine whether they had been transferred, remained somewhere in federal custody or were being prepared for removal. ICE defended the change as part of its effort to prioritize deportations of people with final orders.

There can be no understating what is at stake when the government acquires the power to make people disappear from public view.

This is disappearance by bureaucracy.

People disappear first from public view. Then from the practical reach of their lawyers and families. Then, potentially, from the database. Public records no longer reveal where some detainees are. And sometimes the next stop is another country entirely.

For now, it’s immigrants—our fellow workers, friends, family members, members of our communities, people who pay taxes, contribute to the economy, and once helped make America and its economy the envy of the world—who are being rounded up, designated as “unhuman” in order to deny them basic human rights and made to disappear, but they are just the warm-up.

Watch and learn: once these tactics have been refined and mastered, we’ll be the next targets.

The government has been perfecting variations on this machinery for decades.

After 9/11, the United States transported terrorism suspects—some never convicted of crimes—to secret CIA detention facilities beyond the ordinary reach of American courts and public scrutiny. Extraordinary rendition allowed government to outsource detention and interrogation into legal gray zones.

Yet disappearing people has never required sending them overseas.

Consider Homan Square.

For years, the Chicago Police Department operated a facility on the city’s West Side where lawyers and former detainees alleged that people were taken for interrogation before appearing through normal booking channels. Records later obtained by the Guardian documented more than 7,000 arrests associated with Homan Square over roughly eleven years, while documented attorney access was extraordinarily rare.

That danger is becoming harder to dismiss.

In September 2026, Amnesty International released a report alleging extensive human-rights violations in U.S. immigration enforcement. Amnesty alleges that the current mass detention and deportation campaign has subjected migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to a broad range of abuses.

Amnesty has called for ICE to be abolished.

Whatever the remedy, no government agency should be empowered to act lawlessly and make people disappear.

The Trump administration’s latest tactic for discouraging migration into the U.S. and instilling terror in the hearts of immigrants already here is the use of “third-country removals”: sending certain deportees to countries where they are not citizens and may never have lived.

We saw this in the wake of 9/11 under the Bush administration with their use of extraordinary rendition and remote torture sites.

The rationale seemed to be that if you removed someone from the United States, the Constitution wouldn’t follow them.

Indeed, the Trump administration appears to be trying to move faster than the lawyers and courts in an effort to outrun judicial review and the Constitution.

Perhaps the destination is overseas. Perhaps it is another jail. Perhaps it is another prison right here in America. That distinction no longer matters: you do not have to leave the United States to disappear into the machinery of the prison state.

This is precisely why due process matters.

Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.

Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.

At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”

Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.

The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”

Despite what the Trump administration would have us believe, habeas applies equally to citizens and non-citizens alike within the United States.

The act of transporting someone outside the U.S. does not lessen that protection, but it does make it harder to enforce.

History has supplied enough warnings.

Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War resulted in arrests without ordinary judicial process. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrated how quickly fear and prejudice can overwhelm constitutional safeguards. The post-9/11 rendition program demonstrated how easily government can try to place human beings beyond the effective reach of American courts.

Homan Square demonstrated that you do not have to leave American soil for that to happen.

And today’s immigration detention system demonstrates how these tactics can merge: masked arrests, county jails, private prisons, remote detention centers, repeated transfers, limited access to attorneys, disappearing locator records, expedited deportations and third-country removals.

Each scenario arose from different circumstances, but each also demonstrates what happens when government insists that extraordinary conditions justify extraordinary powers.

This is why the familiar refrain—if you are here legally, you have nothing to fear—misses the point. So does: if you are an American citizen, you have nothing to fear. And: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

That is the oldest sales pitch in the police-state playbook: “Just trust us.” “We’re only going after the bad people.”

But inevitably, the definition of “bad people” changes.

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.

Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.

It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.

Not to me.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.

But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.

Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.

Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.

You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.

Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.

All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.

This is how “We the People” disappear.

Not necessarily onto rendition flights.

Not necessarily into secret prisons.

We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.

That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.

ICE is showing us what the machinery can do.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.

WC: 2405

“The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.” —Justice Hugo Black, New York Times Co. v. United States (1971)

“National security” has become the government’s all-purpose permission slip to behave badly.

They have become the magic words that can make constitutional restraints disappear—especially when the courts defer to claims of national security. Courts have historically been reluctant to second-guess the executive branch when government officials invoke military necessity, classified information, foreign affairs or national security.

Given the judiciary’s longstanding reluctance to second-guess presidential power grabs involving national security, the national-security state has repeatedly used that deference to expand both its own reach and the power of the presidency.

Call something a matter of national security and the normal rules start disappearing: Courts defer. Congress retreats. Secrecy expands. Executive power grows.

“National security” has been used as the justification for surveillance, secret courts, classification, warrantless spying, military intervention, watchlists, detention, border searches, censorship claims and the concealment of government misconduct.

That game is hardly new.

Nixon played it. Bush played it. Obama played it. Biden played it.

Trump may not have invented the national-security dodge, but he has taken it to increasingly absurd extremes.

Under Trump 2.0, almost everything gets branded a matter of national security in order for the president to sidestep as many parts of the Constitution as he finds inconvenient.

At one point, the government even invoked national security to justify proposed tariffs on trumpets, trombones and tubas because the instruments depend on foreign copper alloys.

This would almost be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

Trump wants greater control over the U.S economy? Declare a national emergency and seize the power to levy tariffs in the name of national security.

Trump is disgruntled over relations with Canada? Declare a national security threat and claim executive authority to levy tariffs without going through Congress.

Trump wants to build a lavish ballroom? Stick a bunker below it and a droneport on top, and call it national security.

Trump wants to erect a massive ceremonial arch? Turn it into a military installation, complete with drones, snipers and ammunition, and chalk it up to national security.

Trump doesn’t like unfavorable press coverage? Ban reporters from the White House and characterize the press as a national-security threat.

This is not merely another Trump deflection.

It is the logical culmination of decades spent allowing presidents of both parties to invoke national security whenever they want more power, more secrecy and less accountability.

Trump is demonstrating just how much damage can be done once a president decides that virtually anything he wants can be recast as necessary for national security.

Consider how far down the road we have already traveled under the Trump administration.

Tariffs on allies have been justified as national security. Annexing Greenland has been characterized as vital to national security. Offshore wind projects have been halted on national-security grounds.

Coal plants have been kept operating longer in the name of national security.

Artificial-intelligence infrastructure and massive data centers have been elevated to matters of national security.

Even federal workers’ collective-bargaining protections have been stripped away after agencies were classified as performing national-security work.

And the list keeps growing.

National security has become Donald Trump’s fail-safe strategy for defying the Constitution.

As Sophie Hurwitz writes for Mother Jones, “Trump is using agencies and emergency powers that sprung up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks—and have never been abolished or repealed—to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America.”

Shortly after returning to office, Trump invoked emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, declaring drug trafficking and illegal immigration an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.

Then came the White House ballroom.

What began as a proposal for a lavish space to entertain dignitaries eventually became, amid legal challenges over presidential authority to proceed without congressional approval, a “desperately needed National Security structure” containing hardened construction, bomb shelters, military facilities, drone defenses, sniper positions and other protective features.

Now Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch in Washington—a monumental project conceived in connection with America’s 250th anniversary—is also being recast as a national-security necessity. According to Trump, the arch will double as a “top grade Military Complex” capable of housing large numbers of drones, snipers and ammunition.

And now the logic is being turned against the press.

After barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House over coverage he labeled “fake news,” Trump insists that what he calls “fake news” is “a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

The move prompted CNN, MS NOW and Politico to sue, while the major television networks—including Fox News—suspended their participation in pooled presidential coverage in protest.

The press dispute may be resolved quickly enough.

The courts, historically inclined to defer to the government when national security claims are invoked, have shown a glimmer of backbone in challenging Trump’s most far-reaching claims of national security.

In February 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump’s imposition of global, reciprocal tariffs under an emergency powers law.
In August 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the Trump Administration’s national security justifications for demolishing the East Wing of the White House and replacing it with a ballroom. “While this court accords great weight and deference to invocations of national security and the safety of the President, such arguments are not an automatic get-out-of-law-free card,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote for the majority.

That ruling was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to use national security concerns to sidestep the law at almost every turn. As Axios journalist Avery Lotz explains, national security has become “Trump’s executive sledgehammer.”

Say the magic words and an ordinary policy dispute becomes a national emergency. A legal obstacle becomes a threat to the nation. A constitutional restraint becomes a luxury the president claims the country cannot afford.

For decades, Congress has helped build this monster, repeatedly surrendering extraordinary powers to the Executive Branch whenever presidents invoke war, terrorism, emergency or national security.

Secrecy reinforces the problem.

When the government claims that revealing evidence would itself threaten national security, the public may never know enough to challenge the claim. When courts defer because judges supposedly lack the expertise to evaluate security judgments, meaningful judicial review can shrink. When Congress hands presidents open-ended emergency powers, legislative oversight becomes an afterthought.

The result is a dangerous constitutional equation: the more serious the government says the threat is, the less accountable the government becomes for proving that the threat actually exists.

That turns the constitutional order on its head.

In a free society, extraordinary government power should require extraordinary justification.

In the national-security state, merely invoking an extraordinary threat increasingly becomes the justification.

And that brings us to the far greater danger: a government that can declare anything a national-security concern can eventually declare anyone a national-security threat.

Because the question is no longer merely what constitutes a threat. It is who gets to decide who is one. Who decides who is an enemy? Who decides who is dangerous? Who decides when the normal rules no longer apply?

Once you accept that the president may invoke national security to move outside the ordinary restraints of the criminal justice system, everything depends on who gets classified as a threat.

Governments are always expanding both the definition of “threat” and the universe of people who fit the label. First, it was foreign terrorists. Then sympathizers and associates. Then domestic extremists. Then protesters, journalists, whistleblowers, immigrants, activists and political dissidents.

The targets may change from crisis to crisis, but the machinery for labeling someone a threat remains.

This is why the language matters.

The government does not have to call you a criminal if it can call you a threat. And once you are classified as a threat, the government does not necessarily have to wait for you to commit a crime before it begins treating you like one.

That is the danger when “national security” becomes the exception that allows the government to bypass the rule of law.

The fact that the government does not have to build that machinery from scratch—it already has it—makes our current state of affairs that much worse.

Long before “national security” became the justification for presidential ballrooms, triumphal arches and retaliation against unfriendly journalists, the government had already spent decades constructing a machinery for identifying, monitoring and neutralizing people it deemed potential threats.

Connect the dots.

Start with the Patriot Act and the surveillance powers unleashed after 9/11.

Add the government’s ever-expanding definitions of “extremism” and “domestic terrorism.” Add the NDAA and the normalization of military detention authority in the name of national security. Add the NSA, fusion centers, and government watchlists.

Then layer on facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric surveillance, automated license plate readers and predictive-policing technologies capable of identifying and tracking people at a scale unimaginable a generation ago.

What emerges is not merely a government capable of investigating crimes after they happen. It is a government increasingly capable of identifying people as potential threats before they have committed one.

That distinction matters.

Criminal law traditionally asks what you did. The national-security state increasingly asks what you might do, who you associate with, what you believe, what you say, where you go and whether someone inside the government considers you dangerous.

That is the essence of precrime.

It substitutes prediction for proof, suspicion for guilt and risk assessment for due process.

And we have already seen where that mindset leads.

In the years after 9/11, the government loosened investigative safeguards so that national-security investigations did not always have to begin with evidence that a crime had actually been committed.

The focus increasingly shifted from investigating wrongdoing to identifying people and communities thought to present a potential risk.

Muslim Americans were subjected to sweeping surveillance, questioning, watchlisting and infiltration of mosques and community organizations. Government programs attempted to identify supposed warning signs of future radicalization even while acknowledging there was no reliable way to predict who would become a terrorist.

Racial justice protesters were monitored under the banner of counterterrorism. Political movements were scrutinized as potential sources of domestic extremism. Scientists and academics with ties to China found themselves subjected to heightened suspicion in the name of protecting national security.

The groups change. The rationale does not.

Label a group potentially dangerous. Invoke national security. Loosen the rules. Expand surveillance. Insist that the threat is too serious to wait for an actual crime.

That is how a free society becomes a suspect society.

And once government is permitted to investigate people not because of what they have done but because of who they are, what they believe, whom they associate with or what officials fear they might someday do, the distinction between protecting national security and policing dissent becomes dangerously thin.

Government agencies already possess the technology and legal authorities to identify, label, track and target individuals viewed as potential threats. With every passing day, the technology becomes more powerful, the surveillance more pervasive, and the language of national security even more elastic.

That should concern us far more than any single ballroom, tariff, monument or press dispute.

Because once the government has both the power to define the threat and the machinery to act against it, the most important question is no longer what constitutes a threat.

It is who gets to decide.

This is where Americans make a dangerous mistake when they treat abuses of presidential power as partisan questions.

If you approve of the president, you may not care how broadly he defines national security. If you trust his judgment, you may not object when he stretches emergency powers, sidesteps Congress, attacks the press or argues that the courts should defer to him.

But presidential power does not disappear when your preferred president leaves office. It passes intact to the next one.

Every shortcut becomes a precedent. Every emergency power becomes part of the presidential toolbox. Every expansion of surveillance becomes available to the next administration. Every definition of “threat” can be rewritten. And every power surrendered to a president you trust does not disappear when a president you distrust takes office.

That was the danger embedded in the national-security state long before Trump returned to office.

Trump is simply showing us how far the logic can be pushed.

A ballroom becomes national security. A monument becomes national security. Trade policy becomes national security. Journalists become national-security threats.

Where does it end?

Government critics? Religious groups? Political opponents? People whose online activity triggers an algorithm? Americans whose associations, purchases, travel patterns or communications cause them to be classified as suspicious?

The question is not who has already been swept into this machinery. It is who will be targeted next.

Because, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the government gets a taste for tyranny, there is always a “next.”

Trump will not be president forever. The powers he is expanding will outlast him.

That is the danger.

What we must ask ourselves is whether constitutional government can survive when the government is permitted to decide for itself when the Constitution becomes inconvenient.

The Constitution was written precisely because the Founders understood that government officials cannot be trusted to determine the limits of their own power.

That is why power was divided.

Congress makes the laws and controls the purse. Courts review government action. The First Amendment protects critics. The Fourth Amendment requires government to justify its searches. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process.

None carries an asterisk reading: “unless the president invokes national security.”

Yet that is increasingly how the government behaves.

National security is supposed to protect the constitutional republic. It must not become the excuse for dismantling the constitutional restraints that make the republic worth protecting.

Follow this logic far enough and eventually the issue is no longer what the government wants to build, tax, censor, surveil or conceal.

The issue is whom the government decides it must target and control.

A government that can declare anything a national-security concern can eventually declare anyone a national-security threat. And once “national security” becomes the magic phrase that makes constitutional restraints disappear, all of us are potential threats.

WC: 2436

The Constitution Cannot Protect Itself: The Rutherford Institute Releases 2026 Mid-Year Report

Two hundred and fifty years after America declared its independence from tyranny, the constitutional principles on which the nation was founded are being tested on multiple fronts.

Artificial intelligence and mass surveillance are giving government unprecedented powers to monitor the American people. Emergency powers and executive authority continue to expand. Dissent is increasingly treated as a threat. Militarized policing, warrantless searches, government censorship and attacks on due process are steadily shifting the balance of power away from the individual and toward the state.

These challenges transcend politics and political parties.

For more than four decades, The Rutherford Institute has maintained a simple position: the Constitution must restrain government regardless of who is in power or whose rights are at stake.

Our newly released 2026 Mid-Year Report, On the Front Lines of Liberty: The State of Constitutional Freedom—and the Fight to Defend It, provides a snapshot of the battles we have been fighting this year—from government censorship, AI-powered policing and mass surveillance to religious liberty, free speech, police accountability, due process, government overreach and the criminalization of poverty.

READ THE 2026 MID-YEAR REPORT

The cases and issues highlighted in this report represent only a portion of our work on behalf of constitutional freedom. New threats continue to emerge, new legal battles continue to begin, and The Rutherford Institute remains committed to meeting those challenges wherever they arise.

The Constitution cannot protect itself. It depends on citizens willing to defend it.

Help Defend Constitutional Freedom

The Rutherford Institute provides its legal services at no charge and relies on the support of individuals committed to defending constitutional freedom and holding government accountable.

SUPPORT OUR WORK

“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”—Andrew P. Napolitano

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies.

Not all at once. Not with the Constitution formally abolished or the Bill of Rights ripped from the National Archives.

It dies by degrees: through executive power that expands while congressional authority withers; emergency powers that never quite disappear; wars waged with little regard for constitutional restraints; surveillance systems capable of tracking whole populations; federal agents empowered to operate with ever less accountability; military forces normalized on American streets; and courts that too often allow questions of standing, immunity and procedure to determine whether unconstitutional conduct will ever be confronted on its merits.

Every such precedent makes the next abuse easier. Every exception becomes a justification. Every temporary power becomes harder to claw back.

And every time Americans excuse an unconstitutional act because they approve of the person wielding the power, they help dismantle another guardrail meant to protect them when someone they distrust eventually takes control.

That is the danger we face.

The Constitution was never intended to depend upon the goodwill of those in power.

Quite the opposite.

Those who drafted the Constitution understood that power corrupts, that governments inevitably seek more authority, and that liberty survives only when power is divided, constrained, challenged and made answerable to the people.

The Constitution creates friction intentionally.

It makes government stop and obtain a warrant. It makes prosecutors prove their case. It makes presidents answer to Congress. It makes the military subordinate to civilian government. It protects unpopular speech precisely when those in power most want it silenced. It recognizes that there are places government simply has no legitimate authority to go.

Yet one by one, those restraints have been weakened, bypassed or treated as antiquated obstacles to efficient government.

Consider how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary.

Troops deployed to the nation’s capital in response to a supposed crime emergency remain long after the so-called emergency has passed, with the Pentagon preparing for the National Guard presence to continue through the end of President Trump’s term.

Sweeping surveillance technologies enable police to identify and track people based not on individualized suspicion but merely on where their cell phones happened to be at a particular time.

Federal immigration agents have been given unprecedented resources and authority while allegations mount of excessive force, unlawful arrests, surveillance, intimidation and constitutional violations.

Presidents increasingly invoke emergencies, national security and expansive interpretations of executive authority to do what once would have required meaningful congressional participation.

Meanwhile, the constitutional mechanisms intended to restrain government often operate too slowly—or not at all.

By the time the courts decide whether the government overstepped its authority, the deed may already be done, the troops already deployed, the people already detained, the data already collected, the building already demolished, the war already underway.

That is government unchained.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the government did not accomplish this alone.

The power of the police state depends upon a populace willing to tolerate it.

Remember: when it comes to the staggering loss of civil liberties, the Constitution hasn’t changed. Rather, it is the American people who have changed.

Too many Americans have come to view constitutional restraints not as protections against tyranny but as inconveniences that stand in the way of getting what they want.

If a president they support circumvents Congress, they call it leadership. If a president they oppose does the same thing, they call it tyranny.

If government censorship silences their opponents, they cheer. If the machinery turns against them, they suddenly rediscover the First Amendment.

If federal agents abuse people they regard as dangerous, criminal or undesirable, constitutional niceties seem unnecessary. If they become the target, they demand due process.

This is how freedom becomes partisan. It is also how freedom dies.

The Constitution is neutral when it comes to politics.

It does not recognize Republican rights and Democratic rights, conservative freedoms and liberal freedoms, rights for citizens we approve of and lesser protections for those we fear or dislike.

The Fourth Amendment does not ask how you voted before protecting you against unreasonable searches. The First Amendment does not require that your speech be popular. Due process does not exist only for sympathetic defendants. Religious freedom does not belong exclusively to Christians, Jews, Muslims or any other favored faith. And the separation of powers was not written merely to restrain presidents from the opposing political party.

These safeguards exist because power cannot be trusted.

The greatest threat to constitutional government may not be that Americans have stopped believing in rights. It is that too many now believe rights should depend on whose rights are at stake.

That lesson should have been reinforced over the past 25 years.

In the name of national security after 9/11, Americans accepted sweeping surveillance powers, secret watchlists, militarized policing and an expanding government infrastructure capable of tracking and monitoring ordinary people.

What began as extraordinary powers aimed at terrorism became part of the machinery of everyday government.

In fact, technology has made it possible for government to exercise powers of surveillance and control that the architects of the Constitution could never have imagined.

Yet there are also reminders that constitutional resistance still matters.

This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment “search” when they obtain historical cell phone location data through a geofence warrant—a significant check on a form of digital dragnet surveillance capable of turning anyone carrying a smartphone into a government suspect.

A federal appeals court also upheld restrictions on immigration raids at certain houses of worship after religious communities demonstrated that the threat of enforcement was driving worshippers away and disrupting religious practice.

Most recently, a 7-2 Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in ballots in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.

These victories matter.

They remind us that constitutional government is not entirely lost.

They also remind us of something even more important: rights have meaning only when somebody is willing to assert them. They survive when a homeowner refuses an unlawful search, when a citizen records police misconduct, when a congregation challenges government interference, when a parent questions what information a school is collecting about a child, or when a community forces officials to justify their actions in public.

You have no rights unless you exercise them. And you cannot exercise your rights unless you know what those rights are.

That should concern us because civic ignorance has become a national epidemic.

Too many Americans cannot identify the basic protections contained in the Bill of Rights, explain the separation of powers, or understand why the Founders deliberately made it difficult for any one branch of government to act without checks and balances.

According to the 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, over a third of U.S. adults (35%) cannot name all three branches of the government and under half can name four of the five rights protected by the First Amendment. Of the five First Amendment rights, only freedom of speech is identified by more than half of survey respondents.

That ignorance has consequences.

A people who do not understand why government power must be limited will eventually surrender those limits whenever fear, anger, convenience or political loyalty makes them seem burdensome.

Thomas Jefferson understood the danger: a nation cannot expect to be both ignorant and free.

Those who gave us the Constitution understood something else as well: liberty cannot be preserved by politicians alone.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution begins with three powerful words: “We the People.”

The government exists at the behest of the citizenry, not the other way around.

That means “We the People” have responsibilities that extend far beyond showing up at the polls every few years.

Voting is not enough.

Freedom requires participation. It requires knowing your rights and exercising them. It requires speaking out even when it is unpopular to do so.

It requires demanding warrants, challenging government surveillance, recording police activity where the law allows, serving on juries, attending local government meetings, questioning officials, filing public records requests, supporting constitutional challenges, teaching children their rights, and refusing to let political loyalty override constitutional principle.

It means insisting that Congress act like a separate branch of government rather than a presidential cheering section. It means demanding that courts provide meaningful constitutional remedies while there is still something left to remedy.

It means refusing to allow emergency powers to become ordinary powers. And it means opposing unconstitutional government power even when that power is wielded by politicians we support.

None of this is easy.

Representative government is hard work.

It requires a citizenry willing to stay informed, resist manipulation, question authority, and accept that constitutional limits may sometimes prevent government from easily doing things we might want it to do.

That inconvenience is the point.

The Constitution was designed to make tyranny difficult. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our job is to make sure it stays that way.

So get outraged. Get informed. Get involved.

Get down to your local city council and school board. Get your objections down on paper. Get your representatives to pay attention. Get your children to know their rights. Get your local police to honor the Constitution. Get your media to act as watchdogs for the people rather than lapdogs for those in power.

Most of all, stop waiting for someone else to save the republic.

The courts cannot do it alone. Congress will not do it for us. No president, political party or election will permanently safeguard freedoms that the people themselves are unwilling to defend.

The Constitution is not self-executing.

Its words have power only when “We the People” breathe life into them.

Know your rights. Exercise your rights. Defend your rights.

If not, you will lose them.

The Constitution can’t protect you if you don’t protect it.

WC: 1803

The First Amendment protects more than spoken or written words. Signs, flags, crosses, banners, artwork, holiday displays and other symbols can communicate religious, political, philosophical and cultural ideas—and when private citizens display them on their own property, that expression generally receives strong constitutional protection.

Yet property owners, businesses, churches and community organizations routinely encounter government restrictions on what they may display. Some disputes arise from legitimate concerns involving structural safety, traffic visibility, lighting, height or placement. Local governments may address those concerns through reasonable, content-neutral rules. What government may not do is use zoning ordinances, sign codes, permitting requirements or administrative discretion to favor approved messages while suppressing religious, political or controversial viewpoints.

For more than four decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended individuals and organizations across the ideological and religious spectrum whose expressive rights have been threatened by government regulation. Institute attorneys have intervened when a Virginia church faced criminal prosecution over pro-life signs while favored banners were permitted; when Florida business owners were ordered to remove a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag while government flags remained allowed; and when local officials attempted to prevent an interfaith spiritual organization from establishing a retreat center on private land.

Although the messages and beliefs in these cases differed, the constitutional principle remained the same: government generally may not decide which ideas are worthy of public display. It may not permit favored flags while banning political ones, allow secular or commercial banners while burdening religious messages, or suppress lawful expression merely because officials or members of the public find it offensive or disagreeable. At the same time, constitutional rights do not exempt property owners from legitimate building codes and safety requirements. A city may require permits, engineering plans or inspections for substantial structures and may enforce neutral rules concerning structural stability, setbacks, lighting, maintenance and traffic visibility. The critical question is whether those requirements are genuinely related to safety and land use, applied equally regardless of the message, and no more burdensome than necessary.

To help citizens, property owners and public officials navigate these questions, The Rutherford Institute has issued a new Constitutional Q&A, “The Right to Display First Amendment Messages on Private Property.” The Q&A addresses the constitutional protections afforded signs, flags, religious symbols, artwork and other expressive displays; the limits of local sign and zoning regulations; content and viewpoint discrimination; permit and indemnification requirements; religious land-use protections; and practical steps property owners and government officials can take to resolve disputes without unnecessary fines, censorship or litigation.

Whether a message is communicated through a cross, a flag, a banner or a work of art, the principle remains the same: public safety and individual liberty should not be treated as mutually exclusive, and government does not get to decide which lawful beliefs are worthy of being seen.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

This feature looks at why the Founders understood the jury as a safeguard against tyranny, why twelve jurors matter, and how the erosion of jury rights fits into a broader pattern of diminishing constitutional protections.

POWER AND THE CONSTITUTION: June 2026 

The Jury Box Is Shrinking—and So Are Your Constitutional Protections: Minor v. Florida

Most Americans assume that if they are ever charged with a serious crime, they will be judged by a jury of twelve fellow citizens. That is how the right to trial by jury has been understood for most of American history.

But that protection has been shrinking, like so many of the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Minor v. Florida—a case challenging Florida’s practice of allowing criminal defendants to be tried by juries of only six people instead of twelve—may sound like a technical detail. It is not.

The jury system was designed to stand between the individual and the immense power of the government. More jurors mean broader community representation, longer deliberations, greater scrutiny of the evidence, and stronger protection against wrongful convictions.

Smaller juries do the opposite.

At a time when Americans are facing expanding surveillance powers, militarized policing, politicized prosecutions, and growing government authority at every level, constitutional safeguards should be strengthened—not weakened.

The Sixth Amendment exists because the Founders understood a dangerous truth: governments are not always trustworthy when power goes unchecked.

The jury box was meant to be one of the last lines of defense.

The Case: Six Jurors Instead of Twelve

In Minor v. Florida, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal challenging Florida’s use of six-person juries in serious criminal cases. As a result, the Court left intact a state system in which defendants facing criminal charges can be tried by juries of only six people instead of the traditional twelve-member jury long understood to be required by the Sixth Amendment.

The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU urged the Supreme Court to hear the case, arguing in an amicus brief that the Founders understood the word “jury” to mean twelve members when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified—and that allowing states to reduce that number undermines both the integrity of the justice system and the constitutional rights of the accused.

“At a time when prosecutors already hold enormous power over the lives and liberties of ordinary Americans, shrinking juries means fewer voices, less deliberation, and fewer safeguards against malicious prosecutions and government abuse,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Constitution was designed to restrain the government—not make wrongful convictions easier.”

Florida is one of the few states that still allows smaller criminal juries. As Justice Neil Gorsuch has observed, “only 6 states…tolerate smaller panels [than twelve jurors]—and it is difficult to reconcile their outlying practices with the Constitution.”

What the Sixth Amendment Was Meant to Protect

The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “[i]n all criminal prosecutions,” the accused shall enjoy the right to trial by jury.

The question in Minor was whether that constitutional guarantee can be satisfied by six jurors—or whether the word “jury,” as understood at the Founding, meant what it had long meant under English and American common law: twelve members.

The historical record, as set out in the amicus brief, is clear.

“The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right to trial by jury,” the brief explains. “That guarantee carries with it the Founding-era understanding that the jury—‘the great bulwark of [our] civil and political liberties’—must have twelve members to convict the criminally accused.”

Under English common law, a jury was a body of twelve. A group smaller or larger than twelve could not deliver a valid verdict. That same understanding carried over into American law when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified. As the brief notes, early American courts and legal authorities repeatedly understood the constitutional term “jury” to carry its common-law meaning: twelve members.

This was not a minor procedural preference. It was part of the constitutional architecture of liberty.

As the brief points out, the Supreme Court itself has repeatedly recognized this historical understanding. In Ramos v. Louisiana, the Court reaffirmed that a defendant has a constitutional right to demand that his liberty not be taken except by the “unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve persons.” More recently, in Erlinger v. United States, the Court again recognized that a criminal defendant must be convicted by the “unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbours.”

Yet for decades, defendants in a small minority of states have been denied that full protection when their liberty is at stake. The Rutherford Institute and the ACLU warned that this practice “never would have passed muster at our nation’s Founding.”

Why Twelve Jurors Matter

The number matters because juries are not merely bodies that deliver verdicts. They are constitutional checks on government power.

A twelve-member jury is more likely to represent the community, include diverse viewpoints, resist groupthink, and force the government to meet its burden before taking away a person’s liberty.

A smaller jury narrows that protection.

As Justice Gorsuch has warned in a prior dissent addressing this same issue, “a mountain of evidence suggests that, both at the time of the Amendment’s adoption and for most of our Nation’s history, the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”

The concern is not merely historical.

Empirical research cited in the case indicates that smaller juries are less likely to reflect diverse viewpoints, more likely to overlook dissenting opinions, and more likely to favor the prosecution. By contrast, twelve-member juries deliberate longer, recall evidence more accurately, and provide stronger safeguards against wrongful convictions and government overreach.

In other words, reducing juries makes it easier for the government to convict.

That should concern every American, especially now.

The Jury as a Barrier Against Tyranny

At common law and at the Founding, the jury right was understood as a guard against tyranny and a guarantor of liberty. John Adams described representative government and trial by jury as “the heart and lungs” of liberty, and Joseph Story described the jury as a “great bulwark” of civil and political liberties.

More than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton made much the same point in his essay “The Twelve Men,” reflecting on his own experience as a juror. Chesterton understood the jury not as an inconvenience to professional justice but as one of its safeguards. Questions of guilt and innocence, he argued, are too important to be left solely to trained experts; they require the judgment of ordinary people who bring conscience, common sense, and human sympathy into the courtroom.

That is the point too often lost in modern criminal justice debates.

The jury exists because the government cannot be trusted to police itself. It exists because prosecutors, judges, police, and politicians should not have unchecked power over the life and liberty of the individual. It exists because, before the state can imprison a person, it must answer not merely to officials in power but to the people themselves.

A jury of twelve does more than weigh evidence. It forces the government to persuade a cross-section of the community. It gives dissenting voices more room to be heard. It creates a stronger barrier against corruption, bias, political pressure, wrongful prosecution, and abuse.

As the amicus brief explains, “the greater number provides greater opportunities for dissenters to put the government to its proof.”

That is not a technicality.

That is the constitutional design.

Constitutional Rights Are Rarely Lost All at Once

The danger in cases like Minor is that they can be made to sound small: Six jurors instead of twelve. A procedural adjustment. A matter of efficiency. A question for the states.

But constitutional rights are rarely destroyed overnight. More often, they are chipped away piece by piece, exception by exception, shortcut by shortcut, until the protection that once existed becomes little more than a formality.

Today it may be smaller juries.

Tomorrow it could be weaker due process protections, broader surveillance powers, expanded police authority, more aggressive prosecutions, or fewer barriers standing between ordinary citizens and the machinery of the state.

That same concern runs through other cases in which courts remove key questions from the people and place them in the hands of judges.

In Green v. Tanner—another case the Supreme Court refused to hear—the issue was not the size of the jury but whether a jury should decide the reasonableness of a police officer’s conduct in mistakenly shooting an innocent person, rather than having a judge decide the issue as a matter of law and dismiss the lawsuit against the officer without a trial.

The constitutional concern is similar: when juries are sidelined, the public loses one of its most important means of holding government officials accountable.

That is why the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Minor v. Florida matters.

It leaves unresolved a serious constitutional question about whether states may continue to dilute one of the oldest and most important protections in the Bill of Rights. It also allows the government to keep benefiting from a criminal justice system that already gives prosecutors enormous leverage over the accused.

At a time when public distrust in the fairness of the criminal justice system is growing, weakening the jury system only deepens the danger.

The Last Line of Defense

The Founders did not give us the jury trial as a symbolic ritual. They gave it to us as a safeguard against tyranny. They understood that liberty depends on barriers—barriers between the individual and the state, between accusation and punishment, between government power and personal freedom.

The jury box was meant to be one of those barriers.

When that barrier shrinks, government power grows.

This case was never just about the number six versus twelve. It was about whether constitutional safeguards meant to restrain government power will continue to be treated as essential protections—or inconvenient obstacles.

The Rutherford Institute joined with the ACLU in urging the Supreme Court to hear Minor v. Florida because the erosion of constitutional rights cannot be ignored simply because it happens gradually.

From warrantless surveillance and militarized policing to free speech crackdowns and the erosion of due process, The Rutherford Institute continues fighting to preserve the constitutional barriers standing between the individual and the state.

Because once those barriers fall, all that remains is government power—and whatever rights the government decides to leave intact.

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The Rutherford Institute remains committed to defending constitutional limits, preserving due process, and ensuring that no government agency or administration—regardless of political affiliation—operates above the law.

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Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

May 14, 2026 • Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Sixth Amendment Challenge to Stop Erosion of the Right to Trial by Jury

See how TRI fought back.

The Rutherford Institute’s 2025 Annual Report documents a year in which constitutional freedoms faced some of the greatest assaults in modern American history. In 2025, the federal government expanded executive power, deployed the National Guard into civilian communities, intensified surveillance partnerships with Big Tech, targeted political dissent, and advanced policies that erode due process, privacy, and free expression.

Against this backdrop, TRI remained steadfast in its mission: to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

This report chronicles TRI’s major litigation, advocacy efforts, investigations, and public education initiatives—from challenging speech-based detentions and predictive policing to exposing thought-crime policies, financial deplatforming, religious discrimination, and government coverups.

Read the full report to see how TRI is defending liberty in an age of unchecked power.

2025 Annual Report: Protecting Liberty in a Year of Unchecked Government Power

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether President Trump exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally imposing tariffs under broad “national security” powers.

While it may sound like an economic dispute, this case strikes at the heart of our constitutional order.

Under the Constitution, only Congress—the branch closest to the people—has the power to impose taxes and tariffs. Yet for decades, presidents from both parties have relied on vague emergency statutes to expand executive control over trade, budgets, and national security with little oversight.

The Framers debated this very issue during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Having just thrown off a monarchy that ruled by decree, they vested the taxing and spending powers firmly in Congress—the branch most accountable to the people. As James Madison later wrote in The Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” It was meant to ensure that no president could spend—or tax—the nation into submission without the consent of its citizens’ representatives.

Whether it’s tariffs, surveillance, or the use of military force, every such expansion edges us closer to government by fiat—the very form of rule the Founders warned against.

The question before the Court is bigger than tariffs: it’s whether the limits on presidential power still mean what they say.

Cases: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (Tariffs), Trump v. V.O.S. Selections

Stay up-to-speed on The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing work to sound the alarm over threats to our freedoms, restore the balance of power, and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution: https://www.rutherford.org/signup

Power and the Constitution is The Rutherford Institute’s ongoing series examining how the actions of government—no matter who holds office—measure up against the limits set by the U.S. Constitution.

The Rutherford Institute is sounding a renewed warning against efforts by the government to amass extensive, sensitive private information about individual citizens and their households through its mandatory American Community Survey (ACS). Rutherford Institute attorneys have also formally lodged concerns over a proposal by the U.S. Census Bureau to expand the already exhaustive, invasive ongoing monthly survey to include questions about each household member’s sex assigned at birth, current gender (including transgender, nonbinary, or others), and sexual orientation.

For individuals alarmed by the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to collect and track private information about the citizenry, their home life and personal habits, The Rutherford Institute has made its updated “Constitutional Q&A: American Community Survey” guidelines available at www.rutherford.org. The Institute has also provided a form letter of complaint for lodging objections to the ACS with the Census Bureau.

“In an age when the government has significant technological resources at its disposal to not only carry out warrantless surveillance on American citizens but also to harvest and mine that data for its own dubious purposes, whether it be crime-mapping or profiling based on race or religion, the potential for abuse is grave,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked and singled out must be met with extreme caution. The American Community Survey qualifies as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.”

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a highly invasive, ongoing monthly survey issued by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed housing and socioeconomic data from about 3.5 million households each year. The ACS requires recipients to provide the government with extensive and sensitive information about each and every person in their household, including their work schedules, their physical disabilities and limitations, the number of automobiles kept at the residence, and their access to phone-service and the internet. The information collected by the ACS is not anonymous: the survey is to contain the name, age, sex, race, and home address of each person at the residence, along with the phone number of the person who fills out the form. There are so many questions on the ACS that it is estimated the average household will have to take 40 minutes to answer the questions. When people do not respond online or by mail, the Census Bureau repeatedly sends field representatives to their homes at unannounced times to harass and interview them until they answer the survey. People have reported that field representatives remained outside their houses for hours while waiting for them to arrive home or come out, have walked around their homes, and have talked to minor children when parents were away. The questions on the ACS are so invasive that many initially think the survey is a phishing scam to steal their personal information. Institute attorneys warn that the data collected and amassed by the Census Bureau through the ACS would be a goldmine for criminals.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Warning that the government should not be permitted to use international travel as an excuse to rummage through the digital contents of a person’s life without a warrant, The Rutherford Institute is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rein in warrantless searches of Americans’ cell phones at the nation’s borders and international airports.

In an amicus brief filed in Anibowei v. Blanche, Rutherford Institute attorneys argue that modern cell phones—which can contain years of private communications, photographs, financial and medical information, internet searches, location histories and other sensitive data—cannot constitutionally be treated like ordinary luggage subject to routine inspection at the border.

The case involves an immigration attorney whose cell phone—which contains confidential communications with clients, including clients in removal proceedings involving the Department of Homeland Security—was searched by federal agents five different times at airports when he returned from international travel, including a forensic search in which data from his phone was downloaded and retained by the government.

“The government should not be able to turn every airport, seaport and border crossing into a Constitution-free zone where Americans can be forced to expose the most intimate details of their lives simply because they traveled outside the country. The border-search exception was never intended to become a blank check allowing the government to conduct digital fishing expeditions whenever an American returns home from abroad,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “A cell phone is not a suitcase. It is a digital record of where we go, whom we know, what we believe, what we buy, what we read, what we say and, increasingly, what happens inside our homes. Constitutional rights cannot depend on the government voluntarily deciding not to abuse the power it claims. If privacy exists only at the discretion of law enforcement, it is not much of a right at all.”

At issue in Anibowei is the scope of the “border-search exception,” a judicial doctrine that generally allows government officials greater latitude to conduct warrantless searches at international borders and airports in order to prevent the entry of contraband and enforce customs and immigration laws. The Fifth Circuit has held that government agents may conduct “basic” or manual searches of travelers’ cell phones at the border without a warrant and that an “advanced” or forensic search using external equipment to copy or analyze a device’s contents requires, at most, merely reasonable suspicion—but still not a warrant. In George Anibowei’s case, the appeals court concluded that its existing precedents foreclosed his Fourth Amendment challenge.

Weighing in before the Supreme Court in Anibowei, The Rutherford Institute argues that applying a doctrine developed for searches of physical goods and luggage to the vast quantities of personal information contained on modern smartphones ignores both the history of the Fourth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s growing recognition that digital searches raise fundamentally different privacy concerns. In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court held that police generally must obtain a warrant before searching a cell phone seized during an arrest, recognizing that modern phones can reveal “the sum of an individual’s private life.”

More recently, in Chatrie v. United States, a case in which The Rutherford Institute also filed an amicus brief, the Supreme Court held that the government’s acquisition of certain geofence location data constitutes a Fourth Amendment search. The Institute argues that those same constitutional principles should not disappear merely because a person crosses an international border. Where genuine emergencies require immediate access to a phone, existing Fourth Amendment doctrines already permit warrantless searches under exigent circumstances; otherwise, the government should have to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant for the search.

Theodore A. Howard, Lukman Azeez, Jason McCullough, Boyd Garriott, Stephanie Rigizadeh, Melissa Alba, and Anthony M. Paranzino at Wiley Rein LLP advanced the arguments in the Anibowei v. Blanche amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated, and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

Be warned: the machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.

That is how a police state becomes a prison state.

Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.

We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.

Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.

Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.

This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.

This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.

This is precisely why due process matters.

Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.

Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.

At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”

Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.

The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.

Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.

It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.

Not to me.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.

But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.

Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.

Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.

You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.

Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.

All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.

This is how “We the People” disappear.

We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.

That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.

WC: 1030

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Warning that the government cannot use its regulatory powers to punish or intimidate news organizations for speech it dislikes, The Rutherford Institute has joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations to push back against the Trump Administration’s attempts to undermine the constitutionally protected freedom of the press.

In an amicus brief filed in American Broadcasting Companies v. Federal Communications Commission, The Rutherford Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and a broad coalition of civil liberties groups have asked a federal court to halt the Federal Communications Commission’s unprecedented efforts to use its licensing authority as a pretextual means of retaliating against ABC over editorial decisions and programming critical of the Trump Administration.

In asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to intervene, the coalition contends that the FCC’s early review of broadcast licenses held by ABC-owned television stations constitutes political retaliation in violation of the First Amendment. Noting that a former FCC Chairman stated, “Never in its history has the agency ever acted so corruptly and unlawfully to intrude on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights,” the coalition calls on the court to halt this abuse of executive power.

“The government does not get to decide which news organizations deserve to speak and be heard based on whether their coverage pleases the president,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The First Amendment means very little if government officials can use licenses, investigations and regulatory threats to pressure the press into changing what it reports, whom it interviews or what opinions it allows to be expressed. Whether the target is ABC today or some other media outlet tomorrow, government cannot be allowed to turn its regulatory power into a weapon for punishing disfavored speech.”

ABC filed a federal lawsuit after the FCC ordered eight ABC and Disney-owned television stations to submit applications to renew their broadcast licenses years before those licenses were scheduled to expire. According to ABC’s lawsuit, the FCC had not ordered an early license renewal in more than 50 years and had never required a group of commonly owned network stations to undergo simultaneous early renewal. For 19 months prior to this, President Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr repeatedly targeted ABC programming and personalities, and denounced ABC’s editorial decisions and the views expressed on ABC programs as “corrupt,” with Trump insisting its stations “should lose their Licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans and/or Conservatives.”

Although the FCC maintains that its early-license review concerns potential violations of federal communications law and its equal-employment-opportunity rules, including questions about Disney and ABC diversity policies, the civil liberties coalition argued that the FCC’s stated rationale—which cannot be used as a vehicle for regulating editorial and programming choices—is a pretext for retaliation against protected speech.

In calling on the District Court to intervene, the coalition warned about the chilling effect of prolonged regulatory investigations, which force journalists and broadcasters to operate under the threat of future government sanction. The coalition’s brief argues that the First Amendment prohibits the government from doing indirectly what it cannot constitutionally do directly.

Robert Corn-Revere, Ronald G. London, and Will Creeley at FIRE advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated, and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“National security” has become the government’s all-purpose permission slip to behave badly.

They have become the magic words that can make constitutional restraints disappear—especially when the courts defer to claims of national security.

Call something a matter of national security and the normal rules start disappearing: Courts defer. Congress retreats. Secrecy expands. Executive power grows.

That game is hardly new.

Nixon played it. Bush played it. Obama played it. Biden played it.

Trump may not have invented the national-security dodge, but he has taken it to increasingly absurd extremes.

Under Trump 2.0, almost everything gets branded a matter of national security in order for the president to sidestep as many parts of the Constitution as he finds inconvenient.

At one point, the government even invoked national security to justify proposed tariffs on trumpets, trombones and tubas because the instruments depend on foreign copper alloys.

This would almost be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

Trump wants greater control over the U.S economy? Declare a national emergency and seize the power to levy tariffs in the name of national security.

Trump is disgruntled over relations with Canada? Declare a national security threat and claim executive authority to levy tariffs without going through Congress.

Trump wants to build a lavish ballroom? Stick a bunker below it and a droneport on top, and call it national security.

Trump wants to erect a massive ceremonial arch? Turn it into a military installation, complete with drones, snipers and ammunition, and chalk it up to national security.

Trump doesn’t like unfavorable press coverage? Ban reporters from the White House and characterize the press as a national-security threat.

National security has become Donald Trump’s fail-safe strategy for defying the Constitution.

As Sophie Hurwitz writes for Mother Jones, “Trump is using agencies and emergency powers that sprung up in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks—and have never been abolished or repealed—to threaten domestic dissidents and anyone else he views as an enemy, claiming that those who oppose his policies constitute threats to America.”

For decades, Congress has helped build this monster, repeatedly surrendering extraordinary powers to the Executive Branch whenever presidents invoke war, terrorism, emergency or national security.

Which brings us to the far greater danger: a government that can declare anything a national-security concern can eventually declare anyone a national-security threat.

Because the question is no longer merely what constitutes a threat. It is who gets to decide who is one. Who decides who is an enemy? Who decides who is dangerous? Who decides when the normal rules no longer apply?

The government does not have to call you a criminal if it can call you a threat. And once you are classified as a threat, the government does not necessarily have to wait for you to commit a crime before it begins treating you like one.

That is the danger when “national security” becomes the exception that allows the government to bypass the rule of law.

The fact that the government does not have to build that machinery from scratch—it already has it—makes our current state of affairs that much worse.

Long before “national security” became the justification for presidential ballrooms, triumphal arches and retaliation against unfriendly journalists, the government had already spent decades constructing a machinery for identifying, monitoring and neutralizing people it deemed potential threats.

Connect the dots.

Start with the Patriot Act and the surveillance powers unleashed after 9/11.

Add the government’s ever-expanding definitions of “extremism” and “domestic terrorism.” Add the NDAA and the normalization of military detention authority in the name of national security. Add the NSA, fusion centers, and government watchlists.

Then layer on facial recognition, artificial intelligence, biometric surveillance, automated license plate readers and predictive-policing technologies capable of identifying and tracking people at a scale unimaginable a generation ago.

What emerges is not merely a government capable of investigating crimes after they happen. It is a government increasingly capable of identifying people as potential threats before they have committed one.

That is the essence of precrime.

It substitutes prediction for proof, suspicion for guilt and risk assessment for due process.

And we have already seen where that mindset leads.

In the years after 9/11, the government loosened investigative safeguards so that national-security investigations did not always have to begin with evidence that a crime had actually been committed.

The focus increasingly shifted from investigating wrongdoing to identifying people and communities thought to present a potential risk.

That is how a free society becomes a suspect society.

And once government is permitted to investigate people not because of what they have done but because of who they are, what they believe, whom they associate with or what officials fear they might someday do, the distinction between protecting national security and policing dissent becomes dangerously thin.

Government agencies already possess the technology and legal authorities to identify, label, track and target individuals viewed as potential threats. With every passing day, the technology becomes more powerful, the surveillance more pervasive, and the language of national security even more elastic.

That should concern us far more than any single ballroom, tariff, monument or press dispute.

Because once the government has both the power to define the threat and the machinery to act against it, the most important question is no longer what constitutes a threat.

It is who gets to decide.

This is where Americans make a dangerous mistake when they treat abuses of presidential power as partisan questions.

If you approve of the president, you may not care how broadly he defines national security. If you trust his judgment, you may not object when he stretches emergency powers, sidesteps Congress, attacks the press or argues that the courts should defer to him.

But presidential power does not disappear when your preferred president leaves office. It passes intact to the next one.

Trump will not be president forever. The powers he is expanding will outlast him.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is the danger.

A government that can declare anything a national-security concern can eventually declare anyone a national-security threat. And once “national security” becomes the magic phrase that makes constitutional restraints disappear, all of us are potential threats.

WC: 1052

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies.

Not all at once. Not with the Constitution formally abolished or the Bill of Rights ripped from the National Archives.

It dies by degrees: through executive power that expands while congressional authority withers; emergency powers that never quite disappear; wars waged with little regard for constitutional restraints; surveillance systems capable of tracking whole populations; federal agents empowered to operate with ever less accountability; military forces normalized on American streets; and courts that too often allow questions of standing, immunity and procedure to determine whether unconstitutional conduct will ever be confronted on its merits.

Every such precedent makes the next abuse easier. Every exception becomes a justification. Every temporary power becomes harder to claw back.

And every time Americans excuse an unconstitutional act because they approve of the person wielding the power, they help dismantle another guardrail meant to protect them when someone they distrust eventually takes control.

That is the danger we face.

The Constitution was never intended to depend upon the goodwill of those in power.

Quite the opposite.

Those who drafted the Constitution understood that power corrupts, that governments inevitably seek more authority, and that liberty survives only when power is divided, constrained, challenged and made answerable to the people.

The Constitution creates friction intentionally.

It makes government stop and obtain a warrant. It makes prosecutors prove their case. It makes presidents answer to Congress. It makes the military subordinate to civilian government. It protects unpopular speech precisely when those in power most want it silenced. It recognizes that there are places government simply has no legitimate authority to go.

Yet one by one, those restraints have been weakened, bypassed or treated as antiquated obstacles to efficient government.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the government did not accomplish this alone.

The power of the police state depends upon a populace willing to tolerate it.

Too many Americans have come to view constitutional restraints not as protections against tyranny but as inconveniences that stand in the way of getting what they want.

If a president they support circumvents Congress, they call it leadership. If a president they oppose does the same thing, they call it tyranny.

If government censorship silences their opponents, they cheer. If the machinery turns against them, they suddenly rediscover the First Amendment.

If federal agents abuse people they regard as dangerous, criminal or undesirable, constitutional niceties seem unnecessary. If they become the target, they demand due process.

This is how freedom becomes partisan. It is also how freedom dies.

The Constitution is neutral when it comes to politics.

It does not recognize Republican rights and Democratic rights, conservative freedoms and liberal freedoms, rights for citizens we approve of and lesser protections for those we fear or dislike.

The Fourth Amendment does not ask how you voted before protecting you against unreasonable searches. The First Amendment does not require that your speech be popular. Due process does not exist only for sympathetic defendants. Religious freedom does not belong exclusively to Christians, Jews, Muslims or any other favored faith. And the separation of powers was not written merely to restrain presidents from the opposing political party.

These safeguards exist because power cannot be trusted.

The greatest threat to constitutional government may not be that Americans have stopped believing in rights. It is that too many now believe rights should depend on whose rights are at stake.

Even so, constitutional resistance still matters.

This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment “search” when they obtain historical cell phone location data through a geofence warrant—a significant check on a form of digital dragnet surveillance capable of turning anyone carrying a smartphone into a government suspect.

A federal appeals court also upheld restrictions on immigration raids at certain houses of worship after religious communities demonstrated that the threat of enforcement was driving worshippers away and disrupting religious practice.

Most recently, a 7-2 Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in ballots in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.

These victories matter.

They remind us that constitutional government is not entirely lost.

They also remind us of something even more important: you have no rights unless you exercise them. And you cannot exercise your rights unless you know what those rights are.

That should concern us because civic ignorance has become a national epidemic.

A people who do not understand why government power must be limited will eventually surrender those limits whenever fear, anger, convenience or political loyalty makes them seem burdensome.

Voting is not enough.

Freedom requires participation. It requires knowing your rights and exercising them. It requires speaking out even when it is unpopular to do so.

It requires demanding warrants, challenging government surveillance, recording police activity where the law allows, serving on juries, attending local government meetings, questioning officials, filing public records requests, supporting constitutional challenges, teaching children their rights, and refusing to let political loyalty override constitutional principle.

Representative government is hard work.

It requires a citizenry willing to stay informed, resist manipulation, question authority, and accept that constitutional limits may sometimes prevent government from easily doing things we might want it to do.

That inconvenience is the point.

The Constitution was designed to make tyranny difficult. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our job is to make sure it stays that way.

So get outraged. Get informed. Get involved.

Get down to your local city council and school board. Get your objections down on paper. Get your representatives to pay attention. Get your children to know their rights. Get your local police to honor the Constitution. Get your media to act as watchdogs for the people rather than lapdogs for those in power.

Most of all, stop waiting for someone else to save the republic.

The Constitution can’t protect you if you don’t protect it.

WC: 1085

“I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”—Osama bin Laden (October 2001)

“GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”—President Donald Trump (September 2026)

Days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump flooded his Truth Social account with AI-generated fantasies of himself commanding armies of giant, red-eyed robots.

In one, Trump strides through a darkened Washington surrounded by robotic soldiers beneath the words, “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.” Another declares, “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.” A third depicts Trump seated on a mechanical throne, surrounded by an army of robots and the presidential seal, beneath the warning: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES.”

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president—especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state—is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.

And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?

To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.

That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.

A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.

Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.

Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.

This is the bitter irony of America at 250.

We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.

Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.

What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?

Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.

Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.

And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.

That is the trap.

Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended—it became the government.

The USA Patriot Act, rushed through Congress just 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights. It dramatically expanded the government’s powers, weakened safeguards against government overreach, and opened the door to far-reaching surveillance of the American people.

What was sold to us as a temporary response to terrorism became the foundation for something much larger.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: mammoth legislation that expands the government’s powers at the citizenry’s expense will not make anyone safer.

Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.

George W. Bush gave us the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention and preemptive war. Barack Obama expanded the drone wars, normalized targeted killings and presided over an increasingly sophisticated surveillance apparatus. Successive administrations embraced secret watchlists, warrantless data collection and sweeping executive authority.

Donald Trump did not create this machinery.

He inherited it.

What makes this moment so dangerous is his willingness to use that machinery aggressively, openly and with little patience for the constitutional restraints that are supposed to prevent presidents from becoming kings.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.

Not content to wage war against Afghanistan after 9/11, the United States invaded Iraq under a preemptive war doctrine that embraced striking threats before they were fully formed.

The consequences were catastrophic: lives lost, trillions squandered, regions destabilized, terrorist movements radicalized, and the constitutional power to decide when the nation goes to war steadily transferred from Congress to the president.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.

The circle is complete.

9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: preemptive strikes do not make us safer. They create more enemies, more instability and more blowback.

War has become the permanent business of the American empire.

The military-industrial complex profits. Defense contractors prosper. Politicians posture. Presidents accumulate power.

The American people get the bill.

The post-9/11 wars have cost trillions, killed or displaced millions, and scarred generations of servicemen and women. Every new conflict creates the justification for still more military spending, secrecy, emergency powers and government control.

War abroad has a way of coming home.

After 9/11, the government embraced torture in the name of national security. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what happens when human beings are reduced to enemy combatants and government agents are told the normal rules no longer apply.

That battlefield mindset did not remain overseas.

Local police departments acquired armored vehicles, military weapons, tactical gear and battlefield training. SWAT teams became routine instruments of law enforcement. Military surveillance tools became tools for monitoring ordinary Americans.

Today, ICE increasingly operates like a domestic paramilitary force, carrying out raids, detentions and enforcement operations under a cloak of secrecy and impunity while being equipped with ever more aggressive technologies, from robot dogs to electric shock weapons.

National Guard troops are being normalized as a domestic law-enforcement presence, further eroding the barrier between military and civilian government that laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act were intended to preserve.

The language changed, too.

Citizens became “suspects.” Communities became “threat environments.” Protesters became potential extremists. The homeland became a battlefield.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the tactics and weapons of war, once deployed abroad, will eventually be used against the citizenry at home.

This is precisely what the Founders feared. James Madison warned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

We ignored him.

The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.

The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.

The Patriot Act normalized mass surveillance. Technology has since made the machinery exponentially more powerful.

Today, government agencies no longer need someone following you in an unmarked car to create detailed records of where Americans travel, whom they visit and how they live. Your phone tells them. Your car tells them. FLOCK license plate readers tell them. Facial recognition cameras tell them. Your purchases, internet searches, social-media activity, location history and digital communications fill in the rest.

Allowing the government to spy on the citizenry will not eliminate terrorism. It will create a watched, tracked and increasingly submissive society.

Yet the deeper problem is that we stopped insisting that government obey the same laws it imposes on us. Once “national security” became an acceptable excuse for warrantless surveillance, torture, indefinite detention, secret courts and undeclared wars, the exception began swallowing the rule.

Congress surrendered authority. Presidents seized it. Courts deferred. The public became accustomed to government officials acting first and answering questions later.

Now we see the consequences everywhere.

The Supreme Court increasingly arrives too late to stop executive abuses before the damage is done, if it intervenes at all. The president bulldozes through legal and constitutional restraints, creates a crisis or a spectacle, and leaves Congress, the courts and the American people to deal with the wreckage.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: if we stop holding the government accountable to the rule of law, the only laws it will respect will be the ones it can use against us.

This failure transcends political parties.

Republicans cheered executive power under Republican presidents. Democrats cheered it under Democratic presidents. Then both sides expressed shock when those powers were turned against them.

Powers do not remain partisan.

Surveillance powers created to catch terrorists are used against Americans. Emergency powers become tools of ordinary government. Military powers migrate into domestic policing. Executive powers tolerated under one president become precedents for the next.

And once government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.

Trump is merely the latest president to demonstrate the danger of giving any one person such enormous power. He has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 state and shown how readily it can be turned to the purposes of an increasingly imperial presidency.

We are not merely repeating the mistakes of the past 25 years. We have institutionalized them.

A national-security apparatus powerful enough to track a terrorist can track a political opponent. A president empowered to wage war without Congress can invoke “national security” to bypass constitutional limits at home. A military normalized on American streets can be turned against Americans.

The police state does not care which party controls it.

And therein lies the madness of giving any president such enormous power.

The Founders did not assume that every president would be wise, rational, restrained or benevolent. They divided power precisely because human beings cannot be trusted with too much of it.

A free people cannot make their liberties dependent upon the judgment, temperament or sanity of a single ruler.

Yet for 25 years, under presidents of both parties, we have systematically weakened those restraints while strengthening the presidency.

Now the reckoning has arrived.

Trump’s fitness to exercise the immense powers of his office cannot be separated from the larger question of why any president should possess so much unilateral power in the first place.

The lesson we still haven’t learned: the more power we give the presidency, the more dangerous the presidency becomes when the person occupying it proves unwilling—or unable—to exercise that power with restraint.

That brings us back to the nightmare.

Fear has always been the fuel of the police state.

Keep people frightened enough, divided enough and distrustful enough of one another, and they will beg the government to protect them—even when the price of that protection is their freedom.

That bargain has defined post-9/11 America.

Benjamin Franklin famously warned against trading essential liberty for temporary safety.

We made the trade anyway.

The government seized our freedoms, but the assurance of safety never materialized. Instead, the emergencies multiplied: Terrorism. War. Pandemic. Immigration. Crime. Civil unrest. Political extremism.

Each crisis becomes another justification for government power. Each new power establishes another precedent. Each precedent becomes another weapon waiting for the next president to wield it.

That is what makes the convergence of these two anniversaries so important.

The Declaration of Independence was an indictment of a despot who obstructed the laws, manipulated institutions, maintained standing armies among the people, placed military power above civilian authority and repeatedly violated the rights of those he governed.

Two hundred and fifty years later, those grievances sound uncomfortably familiar.

The uniforms have changed. The technology has changed. The vocabulary has changed. The greed for money and power have not.

Nor have the duties of the citizenry to oppose such tyranny.

If constitutional government is to survive, Congress must reclaim the powers it has surrendered. The courts must stop treating “national security” as a magic phrase capable of making constitutional violations disappear. The machinery of mass surveillance must be dismantled. Domestic militarization must be rolled back. Emergency powers must be temporary, narrow and subject to meaningful oversight.

And the American people must stop allowing fear to dictate the boundaries of their freedom.

Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.

We are doing that ourselves.

Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.

Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms. The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.

America has spent 250 years proclaiming its freedom and the past 25 years building the machinery with which to extinguish it.

Two anniversaries. One reckoning.

America must decide what it intends to be: a republic governed by the rule of law or an empire governed by permanent war, permanent surveillance and permanent emergency.

We cannot be both.

The choice we make will determine nothing less than the survival of the American experiment in freedom.

WC: 2650

Twenty-five years after 9/11, one has to ask: has the nightmare ever really ended?

For a quarter-century, Americans have been governed by fear: fear of terrorists and foreign enemies, fear of domestic extremists and political opponents, fear of the next attack, the next crisis, the next emergency.

That fear has given us endless war, mass surveillance, militarized police, secret courts, indefinite detention, government watchlists, domestic military deployments and an imperial presidency armed with powers that would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

Now the man entrusted with the imperial powers of the modern-day presidency is publicly imagining himself enthroned over robotic armies, raining destruction on his enemies and promising nightmares.

The imagery may be unhinged from reality, but the powers of the presidency are not.

Neither are the questions raised by Trump’s increasingly unhinged public behavior about whether any president—especially one armed with the accumulated powers of the post-9/11 national-security state—is mentally and temperamentally fit to wield them.

That is where America’s two great anniversaries of 2026 collide.

On July 4, America celebrated 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, born from a revolt against King George III and a system in which too much power rested in the hands of one ruler. At its heart was the radical proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the people.

On September 11, we mark 25 years since the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, shattered the nation’s sense of security, and set in motion a massive expansion of presidential, military and national-security power.

America began by rebelling against a king.

Two hundred and fifty years later, we have created a presidency with increasingly king-like powers.

And now we must confront an uncomfortable question the Founders understood all too well: what happens when immense power is placed in the hands of someone whose fitness to wield it is itself in question?

To understand how we arrived at this dangerous moment, we have to go back to the moment when fear gave the government permission to begin dismantling the restraints on its power.

That trail leads inevitably back to 9/11.

A quarter-century later, serious questions and suspicions persist about what government officials knew before the attacks, what warnings were ignored, whether more could have been done to prevent them, and whether the American people have ever been given the full story of 9/11.

Those questions deserve scrutiny, but they should not obscure what we know happened next.

Whatever the truth about what the government knew before 9/11, there can be little dispute about what the government did afterward. It used the attacks and the fear they generated to radically expand its powers over the American people.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the “war on terror” has become a war without end, the emergency has become permanent, the surveillance state has become omnipresent, the police have become militarized, and the presidency has accumulated powers that would have horrified the revolutionaries of 1776.

This is the bitter irony of America at 250.

We declared our independence from a government that subjected its people to standing armies, arbitrary searches, taxation without meaningful representation and the dictates of a ruler who considered himself above the law.

Yet over the course of the past 25 years, in the name of national security, we have resurrected many of those same evils and wrapped them in the American flag.

What did 25 years of surrendering liberty in exchange for security actually buy us?

Not peace. Not security. Not fiscal stability. Not a less intrusive government.

Instead, we got the Patriot Act and mass surveillance; secret courts and government watchlists; indefinite detention and torture; militarized police; endless wars and trillions in debt; and a presidency increasingly untethered from Congress, the courts and constitutional restraint.

And still the government insists it needs more power to keep us safe.

That is the trap.

Twenty-five years later, the emergency never ended—it became the government.

Every president since has inherited the machinery of the post-9/11 national-security state. Every president has found new ways to use it. And almost none of the powers claimed in the name of emergency have ever been willingly surrendered.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the return to preemptive war.

Twenty-five years after 9/11 plunged the United States into a cycle of preemptive war, blowback and permanent emergency, President Trump has launched another preemptive war against Iran without a declaration of war by Congress.

The circle is complete.

9/11 gave us the War on Terror. The War on Terror gave us permanent emergency. Permanent emergency gave us the imperial presidency. And the imperial presidency has given us another war.

But war abroad has a way of coming home.

The result is a country in which the dividing line between soldier and police officer, battlefield and neighborhood, foreign enemy and domestic suspect has become dangerously blurred.

The same vicious cycle has played out with surveillance.

Once the government acquires a weapon, it rarely gives it back.

Twenty-five years ago, Osama bin Laden predicted that the American government would lead its own people into “an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

Bin Laden did not defeat America. He did not destroy the Constitution.

We are doing that ourselves.

Every time we accept another surveillance program because we’re afraid, the Fourth Amendment dies a little more. Every time we tolerate another war because we’re told it will make us safe, constitutional restraints on war-making die a little more. Every time Congress surrenders power and the courts defer to “national security,” the rule of law dies a little more. Every time we allow the government to turn another American community into a battlefield, the barrier between military force and civilian government dies a little more.

Every time we shrug and tell ourselves that the latest encroachment on liberty is temporary, necessary or would only be used against someone else, the Constitution dies a little more.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how freedom dies in a country that still calls itself free.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the question is no longer whether terrorism poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

The question is whether the American Police State itself has become the greater threat.

WC: 1053

“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”—Justice William O. Douglas

For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state.

That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated.

The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and procedure over freedom. It is that by the time justice makes an appearance, it will arrive so narrowly, so procedurally and so late that the government will already have prevailed.

Consider the fight over President Trump’s massive $400 million White House ballroom.

Lower courts found serious reason to doubt Trump’s claim to unilateral authority to tear down the historic East Wing and proceed with the project without congressional approval, and they ordered above-ground construction halted.

Those orders were stayed while the administration appealed.

Construction continued.

Then the administration argued that the project had progressed so far that stopping it had become impractical.

On August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, allowed the construction to continue—not because it determined that Trump had acted legally, but because the majority concluded that the preservationists challenging the project likely lacked legal standing to sue.

The Supreme Court expressly declined to decide whether the project itself was lawful.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joining the Court’s three liberal justices in dissent, warned that allowing the project to proceed was “no victory for the separation of powers.”

Therein lies the problem with justice in the age of the American police state: by the time the courts finally decide whether government officials have overstepped their constitutional authority, the deed may already be done, the right already violated and the damage already inflicted.

The building is already gone. The troops are already deployed. The surveillance system is already operating. The people are already detained. The agency is already dismantled. The data is already collected. The war is already underway.

And whatever constitutional principle eventually emerges from the litigation arrives too late to undo the damage.

At what point will “We the People” be told that we, too, lack standing to object to the destruction of our republic?

The Founders built safeguards into the constitutional system to guard against any one branch of government becoming all-powerful: If the president overreaches, Congress is supposed to stop him. If Congress fails to do its duty, the courts are supposed to intervene. If a lower court gets it wrong, the Supreme Court will set things right.

That is how the system is supposed to work.

But constitutional rights are only as meaningful as the remedies available when government violates them, and increasingly those remedies come with strings attached: You must have standing. Your case must not be moot. You must prove that you were personally and directly harmed. You must sue the right government official in the right court at the right time. You must survive questions of jurisdiction, immunity, procedure and remedy before anyone ever reaches the underlying question of whether the government had the constitutional authority to act in the first place.

Lawyers understand these distinctions.

People whose rights are being violated experience these distinctions differently. To them, it can feel like having the courthouse doors shut in their faces.

This is not to say that standing, jurisdiction and other limits on judicial power are meaningless technicalities. They are part of a constitutional system intended to keep courts from becoming roving commissions empowered to settle every political disagreement.

The judiciary is not supposed to govern the country.

Neither is the president.

That is the whole point of dividing government power among three separate, coequal branches.

Our constitutional system depends upon each branch restraining the others.

Yet when Congress refuses to assert its authority, the Executive Branch overreaches and the courts intervene only after increasingly difficult procedural hurdles have been cleared, the balance of power begins to collapse.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

The White House ballroom is not an isolated dispute. It is a particularly visible example of government by fait accompli.

This has become Trump’s go-to method for sidestepping the rule of law: delay, deflect, deny, and run out the clock until he can claim it’s too late to put things back the way they were.

Governments have relied on this tactic for years, but Trump has turned it into a governing philosophy: Act. Escalate. Delay. Appeal. Keep going. And force everyone else to catch up.

The result is a constitutional system increasingly incapable of preventing government misconduct before the harm occurs.

That distinction matters.

A court ruling issued years after the fact may establish an important principle. It may vindicate someone whose rights were violated. It may even prevent the government from repeating exactly the same conduct in exactly the same way.

But it cannot always undo the harms the government has already inflicted.

You cannot un-deport someone after the government has wrongly removed them from the country. You cannot un-search a home. You cannot un-collect a person’s DNA. You cannot make a surveillance database forget where someone traveled. You cannot restore privacy once the government has mapped a person’s movements.

You cannot restore months someone wrongly spent behind bars. You cannot restore a destroyed building. You cannot give back the life of someone killed by government agents.

You cannot un-launch a war.

In such cases, justice delayed is not merely justice denied. Justice delayed can become justice rendered irrelevant.

This is the problem when courts that were established to serve as Courts of Justice too often function like Courts of Order—more concerned with preserving government authority and institutional stability than with safeguarding the rights of the people.

This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court.

When presented with difficult constitutional questions, the Court too often ducks, remains silent or speaks to the narrowest possible concern. It refuses cases whose underlying constitutional questions desperately need answers. It invokes doctrines of standing, immunity, jurisdiction and procedure that can prevent injured Americans from ever receiving a ruling on the merits of what government did to them.

Too often, the benefit of the doubt goes to the government and the powers of the police state, but the danger has evolved. It now extends far beyond police searches, excessive force and qualified immunity.

We have entered an age in which the government can act far faster than the constitutional mechanisms designed to restrain it.

Recent Supreme Court cases illustrate how complicated—and dangerous—this problem has become.

Consider President Trump’s sweeping tariff schemes.

Trump imposed massive tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, claiming that an emergency statute enacted by Congress decades earlier gave the president authority to effectively rewrite American trade policy.

Businesses paid the tariffs. Consumers absorbed higher costs. Supply chains shifted. Investment decisions were made. Foreign governments retaliated. And while the legal challenges worked their way through the courts, the tariffs remained in effect.

The administration itself warned the Supreme Court that delay could result in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs being collected and international economic arrangements becoming increasingly difficult to unwind.

Eventually, in February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the president did not have the authority he claimed to impose tariffs under that particular statute.

That was an important victory for the separation of powers, but consider what had already happened by the time the Court drew the constitutional line: The money had been collected. The prices had changed. The businesses had adapted. The trade relationships had shifted.

And what was Trump’s response? He responded by turning to different statutory authority in an effort to impose similar punitive tariffs.

When you’re dealing with entities with no regard for the rule of law, an arrogant belief that the laws do not apply to them, and a determination to find other routes to accomplish substantially the same thing, the damage cannot simply be erased by a judicial opinion.

Immigration enforcement presents the same problem in even starker terms.

Under the Trump administration, immigrants have repeatedly found themselves detained, transferred and deported while courts were still trying to determine what process the Constitution required.

While litigation over Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act made its way through the courts, dozens of detainees were flown out of the United States and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador before they had received meaningful opportunities to challenge the government’s claims against them.

Other immigrants were subjected to a policy allowing the government to deport them rapidly to third countries—not necessarily their countries of origin—with little notice and no meaningful opportunity to explain why they might face persecution, torture or death there.

Eventually, in some cases, justice has prevailed, but due process that arrives after deportation is not much process at all.

You cannot meaningfully exercise the right to be heard after the government has already put you on a plane. You cannot easily restore a person to their family, community, job or legal position after they have been expelled from the country. And you cannot pretend that a later judicial declaration fully repairs the harm.

This is government by fait accompli in its most brutal form: Act first. Force the individual to fight for review. Appeal every adverse ruling. Keep the machinery moving. And rely on the fact that by the time the courts finally determine what the Constitution requires, the government may already have accomplished what it set out to do.

Even victories for constitutional limits can therefore arrive with an asterisk.

This is tyranny by technicality.

The Court may eventually say the president exceeded his authority.  It may eventually recognize that a search implicates the Fourth Amendment.  It may eventually insist that immigrants receive due process. But the tariff may already have been paid. The data may already have been collected. The immigrant may already have been deported. The institution may already have been dismantled.

The injury comes first. The remedy comes later. Sometimes much later.

Consider the Court’s ruling this summer in Chatrie v. United States, involving the government's use of a geofence warrant to obtain location information about every cellphone found within a particular area surrounding a crime scene.

The Court rightly recognized that accessing this vast trove of location information constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. That was an important victory for privacy, but even there, the Court stopped short of finally determining whether the government's search was constitutional, sending the case back for further proceedings.

Meanwhile, the search happened seven years ago. The data was collected. The defendant was identified, prosecuted and convicted. The constitutional answer came later. Much later.

This is the pattern.

Surveillance outruns the Fourth Amendment. Immigration enforcement outruns due process. Military deployments outrun congressional oversight. Executive orders outrun legislation. Presidential action outruns judicial review.

By the time the constitutional system catches up, the government has often already changed the facts on the ground.

Yet what good are rights when the courts intervene only after the damage has been done?

And what good is Congress when its members abandon their constitutional duty to check the Executive Branch and instead vote along party lines to rubberstamp whatever their side chooses to do?

The courts were never intended to be the first and only line of defense against an overreaching president.

Congress is supposed to act before the damage is done. It controls the purse. It writes the laws. It conducts oversight. It can compel testimony, investigate abuses, restrict appropriations and refuse to give the executive branch powers it has no business possessing.

Yet increasingly, members of Congress behave as though their constitutional responsibility begins and ends with supporting or opposing whichever party controls the White House.

That is abdication of the worst kind.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly responded to questions about controversial actions by the Trump administration by pleading ignorance, insisting he does not know enough to comment, has not looked into the matter, has not been following it, or regards it as outside his area of responsibility.

That kind of excuse should be unacceptable from any member of Congress, regardless of party.

“I don’t know.” “I haven’t looked into it.” “That’s not my area.” Those may be acceptable answers from an ordinary citizen. They are not acceptable answers from the people elected to Congress to safeguard the constitutional balance of power.

Members of Congress do not get to declare government abuse outside their “wheelhouse.”

Their wheelhouse is the Constitution. Their job is oversight.

Their responsibility is to “We the People.”

If members of Congress cannot be bothered to know how government power is being used, to investigate credible abuses, to challenge unconstitutional actions or to defend the rights of the people they represent, then they are not doing the job they were elected to do.

If they cannot be bothered to fulfill that responsibility, voters should find representatives who will.

While Congress looks away and the courts deliberate, the machinery of the police state keeps expanding.

Automated license plate readers such as those operated by Flock Safety have proliferated across the country, creating vast networks capable of documenting where millions of Americans travel.

For years, these systems were sold as efficient tools for fighting crime.

Only now, after the infrastructure has become widespread, are politicians and communities across the political spectrum beginning to ask harder questions about who can access the information, how broadly it can be shared, how long it can be stored and how easily a system built for one purpose can be used for another.

The backlash is welcome, but it is also late.

The cameras are already there. The databases already exist. The information has already been collected. Once surveillance becomes normalized, promises of restraint are poor substitutes for enforceable constitutional limits.

The same is true of immigration enforcement.

ICE raids intensify. Detention centers expand. Federal agents operate with increasingly militarized equipment and tactics. Case in point: ICE is buying thousands of electric-shock gloves capable of delivering painful electrical pulses and moving to acquire robot dogs equipped with cameras and sensors for enforcement operations.

Each new weapon, technology and detention facility increases the government's capacity to act before meaningful oversight ever occurs.

None of this happens in a constitutional vacuum.

Congress funds it. Congress authorizes it. Congress can investigate it, restrain it, condition the money and demand accountability.

Too often, Congress does none of those things.

The same congressional unwillingness to act has allowed Trump to treat the National Guard as a presidential domestic police force, deploying troops into American cities amid protests, immigration operations and claims of public disorder.

No matter the reason, the precedent should alarm anyone who understands why the Founders feared standing armies and concentrated executive power.

A president should not be able to normalize military deployments against civilian populations simply because Congress prefers not to pick a fight with the White House.

Yet again, the government acts first. Congress watches. The courts deliberate. The precedent takes hold.

Government power has a way of outliving the emergency, administration or political coalition that first demanded it.

Today’s crime-fighting database becomes tomorrow’s immigration-enforcement tool. Today’s immigration-enforcement tool becomes tomorrow’s political surveillance system. Today’s Republican police-state power becomes tomorrow’s Democratic police-state power, and back again.

The names change. The machinery remains.

This is not merely a Trump problem.

That point cannot be emphasized strongly enough.

Donald Trump is exploiting weaknesses in the constitutional system with an aggressiveness few presidents have matched, but every president has benefited from powers accumulated by his predecessors.

George W. Bush expanded the surveillance state and the war presidency in the aftermath of 9/11. Barack Obama inherited those powers and enlarged many of them. Donald Trump inherited them. Joe Biden inherited them. Trump inherited them again.

This is how presidential power grows: amassed by each administration and passed on to the next. Very little of it disappears when administrations change.

This is why partisan celebrations of executive power are so shortsighted. Give your president the authority to bypass Congress, surveil Americans, invoke emergency powers, deploy military forces, punish political enemies or govern by unilateral decree and you have also given that authority to the president you fear most.

The Constitution does not contain a partisan exception—neither should the courts.

Then again, the Supreme Court was never intended to serve as the sole guardian of liberty. Nor could nine justices possibly carry that burden.

A free society cannot outsource the defense of freedom to judges. Neither should Americans deceive themselves into believing that the judiciary will rescue the republic for them.

The Framers divided governmental power precisely because liberty was supposed to depend upon competing institutions checking one another, elected officials respecting constitutional limits, juries resisting injustice, states asserting their sovereignty and citizens refusing to tolerate government abuses.

When all of those safeguards fail, there is very little nine people in black robes can do to save a republic that has already surrendered its constitutional instincts.

That does not excuse the courts.

Far from it.

Judges have an obligation to enforce the Constitution even when doing so inconveniences the government. Especially then.

The Supreme Court should be skeptical whenever government invokes national security, emergency, law and order or administrative convenience as excuses for sidestepping constitutional limits. It should provide meaningful remedies when government violates fundamental rights.

It should not permit constitutional protections to become hollow promises that disappear behind doctrines of immunity, standing and procedure. But neither should Americans deceive themselves into believing that salvation will arrive by judicial decree.

Separation of powers is one of the primary mechanisms by which the Constitution protects ordinary people from arbitrary government. Congress controls spending and legislation. The president executes the laws. The courts decide actual cases and controversies.

Each branch is supposed to keep the others within constitutional bounds. When Congress becomes an appendage of the president rather than a check on him, executive power grows. When courts decline to decide whether that power is lawful until the damage is irreversible, executive power grows again.

Eventually, the exception becomes the precedent. The emergency becomes normal. The temporary measure becomes permanent. The surveillance network becomes infrastructure. The military deployment becomes routine. The executive shortcut becomes another tool in the presidential arsenal.

And “We the People” discover that having rights in theory is very different from possessing the means to defend them in practice.

The Constitution is filled with prohibitions against government. Government shall not abridge freedom of speech. Government shall not conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. Government shall not deprive people of life, liberty or property without due process of law.

Those protections matter only if someone is willing and able to enforce them.

Otherwise, they are words on paper.

This is why we must stop looking to Washington for saviors.

Neither the president, nor Congress, nor the Supreme Court will preserve liberty unless the American people insist upon it.

That means challenging government abuses before they become permanent. It means opposing unconstitutional power even when it is exercised by politicians we support. It means refusing to allow emergency powers to become ordinary powers. It means demanding that Congress act as a separate branch of government rather than a presidential cheering section. And it means insisting that courts provide meaningful constitutional remedies while there is still something left to remedy.

Above all, it means remembering that constitutional government depends upon a citizenry unwilling to surrender its freedoms for promises of security, efficiency, prosperity or political advantage.

The courts cannot restore a constitutional republic after every other safeguard has been dismantled. They cannot undo every government action after the damage has been done. They cannot give back every freedom surrendered in the name of an emergency.

And they cannot protect a people who have forgotten that the Constitution was never intended to be self-enforcing.

The Supreme Court will not save us.

So perhaps the question raised by the White House ballroom is not merely who has legal standing to challenge a president.

The more fundamental question is this: who has standing to save the republic? We do.

And as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if “We the People” refuse to exercise that standing, no matter who sits in the Oval Office or controls Congress—if we fail to use every opportunity to challenge government overreach in order to save the republic—no court in the land will be able to save us from what comes next.

WC: 3433

For years, we have been warning that the U.S. Supreme Court would not save us from the American police state.

That warning has not grown less urgent. It has simply become more complicated.

The danger today is not merely that courts will favor order and procedure over freedom. It is that by the time justice makes an appearance, it will arrive so narrowly, so procedurally and so late that the government will already have prevailed.

Consider the fight over President Trump’s massive $400 million White House ballroom.

Lower courts found serious reason to doubt Trump’s claim to unilateral authority to tear down the historic East Wing and proceed with the project without congressional approval, and they ordered above-ground construction halted.

Those orders were stayed while the administration appealed.

Construction continued.

Then the administration argued that the project had progressed so far that stopping it had become impractical.

On August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, allowed the construction to continue—not because it determined that Trump had acted legally, but because the majority concluded that the preservationists challenging the project likely lacked legal standing to sue.

Therein lies the problem with justice in the age of the American police state: by the time the courts finally decide whether government officials have overstepped their constitutional authority, the deed may already be done, the right already violated and the damage already inflicted. And whatever constitutional principle eventually emerges from the litigation arrives too late to undo the damage.

At what point will “We the People” be told that we, too, lack standing to object to the destruction of our republic?

The Founders built safeguards into the constitutional system to guard against any one branch of government becoming all-powerful: If the president overreaches, Congress is supposed to stop him. If Congress fails to do its duty, the courts are supposed to intervene. If a lower court gets it wrong, the Supreme Court will set things right.

That is how the system is supposed to work.

But constitutional rights are only as meaningful as the remedies available when government violates them, and increasingly those remedies come with strings attached: You must have standing. Your case must not be moot. You must prove that you were personally and directly harmed. You must sue the right government official in the right court at the right time. You must survive questions of jurisdiction, immunity, procedure and remedy before anyone ever reaches the underlying question of whether the government had the constitutional authority to act in the first place.

This is not to say that standing, jurisdiction and other limits on judicial power are meaningless technicalities. But when technicalities are all that stand between us and tyranny, we’re in trouble.

Our constitutional system depends upon three separate, coequal branches of government restraining the others.

Yet when Congress refuses to assert its authority, the Executive Branch overreaches and the courts intervene only after increasingly difficult procedural hurdles have been cleared, the balance of power begins to collapse.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

The White House ballroom is not an isolated dispute. It is a particularly visible example of government by fait accompli.

This has become Trump’s go-to method for sidestepping the rule of law: delay, deflect, deny, and run out the clock until he can claim it’s too late to put things back the way they were.

Governments have relied on this tactic for years, but Trump has turned it into a governing philosophy. The result is a constitutional system increasingly incapable of preventing government misconduct before the harm occurs.

That distinction matters.

A court ruling issued years after the fact may establish an important principle. It may vindicate someone whose rights were violated. It may even prevent the government from repeating exactly the same conduct in exactly the same way.

But it cannot always undo the harms the government has already inflicted.

You cannot un-deport someone after the government has wrongly removed them from the country. You cannot un-search a home. You cannot un-collect a person’s DNA. You cannot make a surveillance database forget where someone traveled. You cannot restore privacy once the government has mapped a person’s movements.

You cannot restore months someone wrongly spent behind bars. You cannot restore a destroyed building. You cannot give back the life of someone killed by government agents.

You cannot un-launch a war.

In such cases, justice delayed is not merely justice denied. Justice delayed can become justice rendered irrelevant.

This is the problem when courts that were established to serve as Courts of Justice too often function like Courts of Order—more concerned with preserving government authority and institutional stability than with safeguarding the rights of the people.

This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court. When presented with difficult constitutional questions, the Court too often ducks, remains silent or speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

Too often, the benefit of the doubt goes to the government and the powers of the police state, but the danger now extends far beyond police searches, excessive force and qualified immunity.

Even victories for constitutional limits arrive with an asterisk.

This is tyranny by technicality.

Yet the courts were never intended to be the first and only line of defense against an overreaching president.

Congress is supposed to act before the damage is done. Unfortunately, members of Congress behave as though their constitutional responsibility begins and ends with supporting or opposing whichever party controls the White House.

That is abdication of the worst kind.

This is why we must stop looking to Washington for saviors.

Neither the president, nor Congress, nor the Supreme Court will preserve liberty unless the American people insist upon it.

That means challenging government abuses before they become permanent. It means opposing unconstitutional power even when it is exercised by politicians we support. It means refusing to allow emergency powers to become ordinary powers. It means demanding that Congress act as a separate branch of government rather than a presidential cheering section. And it means insisting that courts provide meaningful constitutional remedies while there is still something left to remedy.

Above all, as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it means remembering that constitutional government depends upon a citizenry unwilling to surrender its freedoms for promises of security, efficiency, prosperity or political advantage.

Who has standing to save the republic? We do.

WC: 1090

RICHMOND, Va — In a victory for religious liberty, a federal appeals court has upheld restrictions on ICE raids at certain houses of worship, recognizing that the threat of immigration enforcement can itself burden religious exercise by driving worshippers away and forcing faith communities to alter their religious practices.

The unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. DHS affirmed a preliminary injunction requiring the Department of Homeland Security to abide by its previous safeguards when conducting immigration enforcement actions at or near the plaintiffs’ houses of worship. The Fourth Circuit found that the faith communities are likely to succeed on their claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The Rutherford Institute, in conjunction with Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic, argued that allowing ICE and Border Patrol agents unilateral discretion to conduct raids inside houses of worship threatens First Amendment protections and violates RFRA by chilling the free exercise of religion.

“Churches, synagogues, temples and mosques should be places where individuals can gather to worship without having to fear the menace of the police state,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The government does not have to outlaw a religion or padlock the church doors to undermine religious freedom. Sometimes all it takes is making people afraid to walk through them. When the threat of armed government agents causes people to stay home, churches to lock their doors, and faith communities to change how they worship, the chilling effect is real. This ruling recognizes that religious liberty cannot flourish under a cloud of government intimidation.”

For decades, federal immigration agencies limited enforcement actions at or near houses of worship. That changed during President Trump’s second term when, in January 2025, DHS rescinded those protections and replaced them with a policy largely allowing immigration officers to rely on their discretion in deciding whether to conduct enforcement operations at sensitive locations. In affirming the injunction, the Fourth Circuit pointed to DHS’s own announcement that “[c]riminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” concluding that DHS “has made clear that it intends to target houses of worship in future immigration enforcement actions.” The court further found that the 2025 policy “implicates direct, coercive interactions between government agents and churchgoers.”

The challenge was brought by Quaker, Cooperative Baptist, and Sikh faith communities whose religious practices emphasize communal worship and welcoming others, including immigrants. Evidence showed that the threat of ICE enforcement contributed to declining attendance, fear among worshippers, and changes in religious practice. One Baptist congregation reported a 66 percent drop in attendance at its English-as-a-Second-Language classes, while other congregations reported locking their doors or becoming reluctant to invite immigrants to worship. The district court issued a preliminary injunction requiring DHS to adhere to its prior safeguards at or near the plaintiffs' houses of worship, which the Fourth Circuit has now affirmed.

The Fourth Circuit rejected the government's argument that these harms were too speculative, finding declining attendance to be a “predictable effect” of DHS's policy and concluding that the resulting disruption of communal worship was sufficient to establish a likely substantial burden under RFRA. The injunction applies only to the plaintiffs' houses of worship and requires DHS to abide by its previous safeguards, including generally obtaining prior agency approval for enforcement actions unless exigent circumstances exist.

Joshua C. McDaniel, Parker W. Knight III, Kathryn F. Mahoney, and Steven W. Burnett with Harvard Law School’s Religious Freedom Clinic advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.“—Theodore Roosevelt

What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security.

To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.

And what a bunker it is.

Court documents indicate the massive subterranean military complex being constructed five stories beneath the White House grounds will include bomb shelters, a hospital, “top secret military structures and equipment, military-grade venting, a single integrated air conditioning and heating system, sniper nests and a drone port on top.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has explicitly invoked “continuity-of-government interests“ in defending the ballroom/bunker project, arguing that the reinforced underground military installation is necessary to ensure uninterrupted presidential command during an attack or global crisis.

The White House, however, already has a bunker built for precisely this purpose.

According to former officials, a nuclear-hardened facility buried more than 60 feet underground was secretly completed during the Obama administration. It can reportedly shelter dozens of officials for weeks and provide the president and senior officials with a secure command center during an extreme national-security crisis.

Which raises an obvious question: if the White House already has a nuclear-hardened Continuity of Government bunker, why does it need another one?

What threat justifies a new five-story military complex beneath the People’s House—one large enough to include bomb shelters, a hospital, military infrastructure, sniper positions and drone facilities? And if this is really about national security, why has so much of the project been wrapped around a ballroom that the administration initially presented as something quite different?

It is telling that they are building it at breakneck speed.

According to court filings, hundreds of workers have been laboring around the clock, 20 hours a day, seven days a week, to push the project forward as quickly as possible.

The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built.

There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.

That is how the architecture of authoritarian government becomes permanent: Build the surveillance system. Build the detention centers. Expand the raids. Normalize executive rule by decree. Weaken the courts. Sideline Congress. Militarize the machinery of enforcement. Then hand it all to the next administration.

The faces change. The powers remain.

So much of what Trump is using today was inherited from presidents before him. So much of what he is building now will remain available to presidents after him.

That is the deeper problem with the Bunker State.

It is not merely about where government officials go when disaster strikes.

It is about the mindset of a government that increasingly treats preservation of its own power as the highest form of national security.

There is a grim irony in watching Washington spend enormous sums fortifying itself against catastrophe while government itself lurches from crisis to crisis and foreign conflict to economic disruption. Again and again, the pattern is the same: create or exploit the crisis, invoke extraordinary powers to manage it, insulate those in power from the consequences, and leave the public to absorb the cost.

That is the bunker mentality in practice.

And Continuity of Government gives it a blueprint to follow.

Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.

The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.

But 9/11 changed the equation.

Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.

COG was part of that transformation.

What had been designed for doomsday became part of everyday government. The bunkers at Raven Rock and Mount Weather were part of the plan to keep Washington functioning even if Washington itself could no longer function.

The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.

Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.

But what about the Constitution?

That is the question all of this elaborate government survival planning never answers satisfactorily. Who guarantees that Congress remains meaningful, the courts independent, elections intact, emergency powers temporary and the rights of the people protected?

Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.

It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.

After 9/11 came the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret courts, watchlists, military detention and a vastly expanded national-security state. COVID showed how quickly emergency orders could intrude on movement, assembly, commerce and ordinary constitutional processes in the name of public safety.

Wars have expanded executive power. Border emergencies have expanded executive power. Civil unrest has expanded executive power. Public-health emergencies have expanded executive power.

The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

This is the real danger of a government accustomed to governing by emergency: the trigger does not have to be Armageddon. It can be terrorism, a cyberattack, a pandemic, civil disorder or some broadly defined threat to national security. It merely has to be a crisis serious enough for those in power to declare that ordinary rules can no longer apply.

The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.

That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.

This is how the police state grows—incrementally, across administrations and parties.

Every president inherits the emergency powers, secret directives, surveillance machinery, militarized forces and weaponry assembled by his predecessors. Every president adds something to the arsenal. And every president leaves the next occupant of the White House more powerful than the one before.

Trump inherited Obama’s powers. Obama inherited Bush’s. Bush inherited those accumulated before him. And whoever follows Trump will inherit everything Trump leaves behind.

That is the lesson of the modern police state: presidents are temporary. The powers they leave behind are not.

Trump did not invent the Bunker State. He inherited it—and he is expanding it while further erasing the lines between presidential power, personal power and the national interest.

The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.

And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.

More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.

Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.

One operates in the background. The other waits for the so-called emergency. But both run on the same machinery.

The Deep State supplies the permanent personnel and institutions. The surveillance state supplies the intelligence. The militarized police state supplies the enforcement. The presidency supplies the command authority. Continuity of Government supplies the emergency architecture. And the bunker supplies the headquarters.

Under ordinary circumstances, these systems may appear to operate separately.

Under emergency conditions, they can become one.

That is how the permanent state becomes the emergency state. And that is when Continuity of Government becomes Continuity of Tyranny.

The issue is not whether government officials have somewhere safe to go during an attack. The issue is what kind of government emerges afterwards.

A constitutional republic depends on divided power, public accountability and limits that cannot disappear whenever a president invokes emergency.

A bunker government is built on a very different logic. Command must continue. Government must survive. Constitutional restraints become negotiable.

That is the bunker mindset.

And increasingly, we do not need an actual bunker to see it at work.

We see it whenever presidents bypass Congress in the name of necessity, whenever surveillance expands in the name of security, and whenever courts are treated as obstacles rather than constitutional checks.

The bunker mentality begins long before anyone goes underground. It begins the moment government decides its own power matters more than constitutional restraint.

That is why the central question is not simply whether the federal government will survive the next catastrophe.

It almost certainly will.

The government has spent decades and untold billions making certain of that.

The more important question is whether constitutional government survives with it.

Will Congress retain meaningful authority? Will the courts continue functioning independently? Will elections remain meaningful? Will habeas corpus remain intact?

Or will the next emergency merely provide the justification for suspending restraints that have already been weakened in practice?

These are not questions for some distant doomsday.

They are questions for right now.

A government that already possesses mass surveillance, militarized police, detention powers, biometric tracking, drones and facial recognition does not need to invent the machinery of authoritarian control during an emergency.

It already has it.

All an emergency does is change the rules governing how freely that machinery can be used.

That is why the government’s obsession with Continuity of Government should concern anyone who cares about continuity of constitutional government.

A bunker can preserve a president—it cannot preserve a republic. A military command center can ensure continuity of power—it cannot ensure continuity of liberty.

Stanley Kubrick depicted the grotesque logic behind government survival in Dr. Strangelove more than 60 years ago.

As political and military leaders push the world toward nuclear annihilation, Dr. Strangelove proposes retreating into a government bunker, where officials, military leaders and other carefully selected survivors can wait out the radioactive fallout and eventually emerge to rebuild civilization in their own image. The people being saved, naturally, include many of the same people who helped create the catastrophe.

Kubrick’s black comedy bears an unnerving resemblance to current events.

The unsettling question is the same: when catastrophe comes, will the government preserve constitutional government—or merely preserve itself?

A constitutional government is defined by the limits placed on those who govern.

Serious government requires presidents who respect the limits of office, a Congress that exercises its authority, courts willing to restrain power, military force subordinate to constitutional authority, and citizens who understand that liberty depends on keeping power restrained.

The Founders understood this better than most.

They did not design the Constitution on the assumption that those who govern would always be wise, honorable or restrained. They assumed the opposite. They understood that power attracts ambition, that ambition seeks more power, and that government must therefore be divided, checked and bound down by law.

Thomas Jefferson put it bluntly: “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Those chains are already being weakened.

Presidents declare emergencies. Presidents wage wars without meaningful congressional restraint. Presidents deploy military forces. Presidents conduct surveillance. Presidents issue decrees carrying the force of law. Presidents inherit extraordinary powers from their predecessors and add still more for whoever comes next.

Meanwhile, as we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the unelected machinery of government carries on.

This is what happens when a constitutional republic adopts a bunker mindset: government survival becomes the priority, and constitutional survival becomes an afterthought.

That is backwards.

The government exists to preserve liberty. Liberty does not exist to preserve the government.

If constitutional government cannot survive above ground, in ordinary times, when the courts are open, Congress is sitting and elections are still being held, there is little reason to believe it will somehow be resurrected underground in the wake of a national catastrophe.

What deserves continuity is not merely the federal bureaucracy.

What deserves continuity is the Constitution. The separation of powers. The rule of law. Representative government. Due process. Habeas corpus. The rights of the people.

That is what must survive.

And if we cannot preserve those things now—before the sirens sound, before the government retreats underground, before some president invokes the next great emergency—then no bunker, however deep, however secure and however lavishly equipped, will save the republic.

Because the Constitution cannot survive in a bunker underground if we have already allowed it to die above ground.

WC: 2171

What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security.

To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker.

And what a bunker it is.

Court documents indicate the massive subterranean military complex being constructed five stories beneath the White House grounds will include bomb shelters, a hospital, “top secret military structures and equipment, military-grade venting, a single integrated air conditioning and heating system, sniper nests and a drone port on top.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff, has explicitly invoked “continuity-of-government interests“ in defending the ballroom/bunker project, arguing that the reinforced underground military installation is necessary to ensure uninterrupted presidential command during an attack or global crisis.

It is telling that they are building it at breakneck speed.

The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built.

There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.

That is how the architecture of authoritarian government becomes permanent: Build the surveillance system. Build the detention centers. Expand the raids. Normalize executive rule by decree. Weaken the courts. Sideline Congress. Militarize the machinery of enforcement. Then hand it all to the next administration.

The faces change. The powers remain.

So much of what Trump is using today was inherited from presidents before him. So much of what he is building now will remain available to presidents after him.

That is the deeper problem with the Bunker State.

It is not merely about where government officials go when disaster strikes.

It is about the mindset of a government that increasingly treats preservation of its own power as the highest form of national security.

That is the bunker mentality in practice.

And Continuity of Government gives it a blueprint to follow.

Continuity of Government planning, or COG, was devised during the Cold War to ensure that the federal government could survive a Soviet nuclear attack. If Washington were destroyed, surviving officials would disperse to secure locations, maintain command and eventually reconstitute constitutional government.

The goal, at least in theory, was survival long enough to restore constitutional order.

But 9/11 changed the equation.

Nearly twenty-five years later, we are still living with the consequences.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did more than kill nearly 3,000 people. They gave Washington the crisis it needed to dramatically expand emergency powers, surveillance and the national-security state.

COG was part of that transformation.

The government has spent billions making certain that it can survive almost anything. But survival of the government is not the same as preservation of the republic.

Presidents, agencies, military commands, intelligence operations and critical records can all be relocated so that the machinery of government can keep functioning underground.

But what about the Constitution?

That is the question all of this elaborate government survival planning never answers satisfactorily. Who guarantees that Congress remains meaningful, the courts independent, elections intact, emergency powers temporary and the rights of the people protected?

Those questions matter because COG is no longer merely about bunkers.

It is part of a much larger emergency state—a government that has learned to govern through crisis, fear and claims of necessity.

The emergencies change. The response does not: government claims extraordinary powers, and the extraordinary gradually becomes ordinary.

This is the real danger of a government accustomed to governing by emergency: the trigger does not have to be Armageddon. It can be terrorism, a cyberattack, a pandemic, civil disorder or some broadly defined threat to national security. It merely has to be a crisis serious enough for those in power to declare that ordinary rules can no longer apply.

The most dangerous words in government are often some variation of: this is an emergency.

That is when temporary measures become precedents, precedents become policies, and policies become permanent powers.

Trump did not invent the Bunker State. He inherited it—and he is expanding it while further erasing the lines between presidential power, personal power and the national interest.

The government beneath Trump was built over decades, with the complicity of presidents, Congresses and courts that repeatedly allowed extraordinary powers to become permanent.

And behind it all sits another government—a shadow government—that elections rarely disturb.

More than a decade ago, we warned that America effectively had two shadow governments: Continuity of Government, the emergency government waiting in the wings for catastrophe, and the Deep State, the permanent government that carries on regardless of who occupies the White House.

Today, it’s hard to tell them apart.

Under ordinary circumstances, these systems may appear to operate separately.

Under emergency conditions, they can become one.

That is how the permanent state becomes the emergency state. And that is when Continuity of Government becomes Continuity of Tyranny.

A government that already possesses mass surveillance, militarized police, detention powers, biometric tracking, drones and facial recognition does not need to invent the machinery of authoritarian control during an emergency.

It already has it.

All an emergency does is change the rules governing how freely that machinery can be used.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, when a constitutional republic adopts a bunker mindset, government survival becomes the priority, and constitutional survival becomes an afterthought.

If constitutional government cannot survive above ground, in ordinary times, when the courts are open, Congress is sitting and elections are still being held, there is little reason to believe it will somehow be resurrected underground in the wake of a national catastrophe.

What deserves continuity is not merely the federal bureaucracy.

What deserves continuity is the Constitution. The separation of powers. The rule of law. Representative government. Due process. Habeas corpus. The rights of the people.

That is what must survive.

And if we cannot preserve those things now—before the sirens sound, before the government retreats underground, before some president invokes the next great emergency—then no bunker, however deep, however secure and however lavishly equipped, will save the republic.

Because the Constitution cannot survive in a bunker underground if we have already allowed it to die above ground.

WC: 1065

“Electric shock has long been a common method of inflicting torture or other forms of ill-treatment worldwide. While electric shocks are sometimes inflicted using makeshift equipment—for instance, car batteries, mains wires or cattle prods—a wide variety of electric shock devices are specifically designed for and marketed to law enforcement.”—Amnesty International

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed. Government agents operating behind masks while refusing to identify themselves or explain the authority under which they act.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

The Trump administration insists that these shock gloves offer ICE agents a less lethal alternative to guns, tasers and pepper spray. Certainly, if the choice were truly between an electric shock and a bullet, the less lethal option would be preferable.

But that is not the real choice confronting us.

The question is whether an agency with ICE’s record of abuse, secrecy and constitutional violations should be entrusted with yet another tool that makes it easier to inflict pain in order to force submission.

The problem is not merely the weapon. The problem is who will be wearing it.

ICE has already demonstrated what happens when government agents are empowered to treat noncompliance as a threat.

A recent ACLU review of more than 1,200 immigration-enforcement incidents documented hundreds of instances in which agents pushed, shoved, tackled or pinned people, along with dozens of incidents involving tactics capable of restricting breathing. Chemical agents were deployed hundreds of times. The incidents included U.S. citizens caught up in immigration operations and families confronted by armed and masked agents.

Inside ICE detention facilities, the record is equally disturbing.

Internal ICE documents reviewed by The Washington Post revealed 1,460 reported use-of-force incidents between January 2024 and February 2026. During the first year of Trump’s second term, detention staff used force 37 percent more often than during the preceding year, while the number of detainees subjected to force increased 54 percent.

In some cases, detainees were asking for food, water, medical attention or their personal belongings. In others, they were protesting the conditions under which they were being confined.

One group at a Georgia detention center was pepper-sprayed after refusing to return to their cells while complaining that they had not received medical care.

The official justification was chillingly familiar: to “gain compliance and control.”

That is precisely why ICE’s new shock gloves should concern anyone who cares about civil liberties.

Less lethal does not mean less abusive.

Indeed, the danger with so-called less-lethal weapons is that because they are perceived as safer than firearms, government agents may become more willing to use them in circumstances that would never justify deadly force.

A gun is obviously a weapon.

A baton is obviously a weapon.

A taser is obviously a weapon.

An electrified glove can look like an ordinary piece of equipment until the moment an agent lays a hand on you.

The shock ends when contact ends. The devices reportedly do not incapacitate a person in the way a taser can, and supporters emphasize that they generally do not leave burns or obvious contact marks.

That is supposed to reassure us. It should do the opposite.

Any government technology capable of inflicting intense pain while potentially leaving little visible evidence of its use demands extraordinarily strict controls, transparency and accountability.

ICE has demonstrated little reason to believe those safeguards will exist.

When accountability disappears, anything goes.

This is an agency whose detention centers remain largely closed to public scrutiny, whose internal reports have obscured or omitted serious uses of force, and whose agents have repeatedly operated in ways that make meaningful public accountability difficult.

Even members of Congress attempting to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities have been blocked from entering ICE facilities.

Meanwhile, ICE has built an expansive surveillance dragnet incorporating facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking and massive databases capable of locating and monitoring people across the country.

Put all of these pieces together and the picture should disturb Americans regardless of their views on immigration.

Masked agents. Hidden identities. Mass surveillance. Unmarked vehicles. Expansive arrest powers. Mass detention. Weak oversight. Billions of dollars in new funding. And now the ability to deliver electric shocks at the touch of a hand.

This is no longer merely an immigration enforcement bureaucracy.

It is the architecture of a national police force.

And increasingly, ICE is being positioned to serve the role that secret police forces have historically served in authoritarian systems: operating with extraordinary powers, obscured identities, limited accountability, and a broad mandate to identify, track, detain and remove people whom the government has designated as undesirable.

This does not mean America has suddenly become Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or some other totalitarian regime. History rarely repeats itself so neatly.

What history does teach, however, is that authoritarian governments do not begin with death camps and firing squads.

They begin by normalizing powers that once would have been considered intolerable.

They begin by identifying a population that can be stripped of rights with minimal political consequences. They begin by convincing citizens that extraordinary government powers are necessary because the people being targeted are dangerous, criminal, foreign or undeserving. They begin by making government agents harder to identify and harder to hold accountable. They begin by expanding detention. They begin by expanding surveillance. They begin by lowering the threshold for the use of force.

And they teach the public that obedience is the price of safety.

ICE is serving as the prototype for what a much broader system of authoritarian enforcement could look like.

Immigrants may be the government’s primary targets today. They will not necessarily be the only targets tomorrow.

The constitutional danger has never depended on whether one sympathizes with the first people subjected to government abuse. The question is whether we allow the government to acquire powers that can eventually be turned against anyone.

Once the government normalizes masked federal agents carrying out warrantless sweeps, what prevents those tactics from being used in the name of fighting drugs? Or terrorism? Or political extremism? Or civil unrest? Or public health emergencies? Or whatever crisis comes next?

Once the government builds massive databases capable of tracking people’s movements and associations, those systems do not disappear when immigration enforcement changes. Once detention infrastructure is built, it can be repurposed. Once federal agencies are allowed to operate outside meaningful oversight, restoring those restraints becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Once Americans accept the principle that government agents may inflict pain merely to secure “compliance,” the Constitution has already lost critical ground.

And once anything goes in the name of immigration enforcement, there is little to prevent those same powers from being repurposed in the name of the next crisis.

This is why the debate over ICE’s electric shock gloves cannot be reduced to a technical discussion about whether one weapon is safer than another.

The gloves are merely the latest manifestation of a far more dangerous philosophy of government.

It is the philosophy that says government knows best. That government commands must be obeyed. That government agents should be feared rather than questioned. That constitutional rights become negotiable whenever officials invoke public safety. That accountability is an inconvenience. And that force is an acceptable substitute for consent.

This is precisely the mentality the Constitution was intended to restrain.

The Fourth Amendment does not say obey first and challenge the government later.

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that government agents find agreeable.

The Fifth Amendment does not permit government to dispense with due process because officials have decided someone probably does not belong here.

And the Constitution contains no exception allowing government agents to punish people simply because they fail to show sufficient deference.

Yet that is the direction in which the American police state continues to move.

We are told not to worry because the weapons are “less lethal.” We are told not to worry because the raids target immigrants. We are told not to worry because the surveillance is necessary. We are told not to worry because the detention centers are temporary. We are told not to worry because good people who follow the law have nothing to fear.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have heard all of this before.

Every expansion of government power comes wrapped in assurances that it will be used sparingly, responsibly and only against people who deserve it.

Then the definition of who deserves it expands.

Government power does not police itself. Neither will ICE.

The gloves are off.

The question now is how much more power Americans are willing to place in the government’s hands before we finally recognize what is being built around us.

WC: 1737

This is what comes of giving a lawless agency unlimited funds to build detention centers, terrorize communities, and act as a secret police force.

Anything goes.

Masked raids. Unmarked vehicles. Warrantless arrests. Racial profiling. Sweeping surveillance. Detention camps. Excessive force. Citizens dragged off the streets. Protesters targeted. Congressional oversight obstructed.

Now add electric shock gloves to the arsenal.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to spend as much as $20 million to equip its agents with thousands of gloves capable of delivering painful electric shocks through direct contact with a person’s skin.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E.s—Generated Low Output Voltage Emitters—and the government has dressed them up in the predictably sanitized language of the police state as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

Don’t be fooled by the benign-sounding euphemisms.

These are pain-compliance weapons.

ICE agents wearing the gloves will be able to touch a person’s exposed skin and deliver an electric shock intended to compel obedience.

White House border czar Tom Homan has been remarkably candid about the purpose: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

There is that word again: compliance.

It has become one of the most dangerous words in the vocabulary of the American police state.

Increasingly, government agents are being taught—and the public conditioned to accept—that refusal to immediately comply with a government agent’s command is sufficient justification for force.

Question an officer. Hesitate. Pull away. Protest. Demand to know why you are being detained. Refuse to surrender your phone. Attempt to record an arrest. Insist on your constitutional rights. Fail to obey quickly enough.

The government’s answer is increasingly the same: comply or die—comply or suffer the consequences.

Now those consequences may come through the touch of a gloved hand.

The Trump administration insists that these shock gloves offer ICE agents a less lethal alternative to guns, tasers and pepper spray. But that is not the real choice confronting us.

The question is whether an agency with ICE’s record of abuse, secrecy and constitutional violations should be entrusted with yet another tool that makes it easier to inflict pain in order to force submission.

The problem is not merely the weapon. The problem is who will be wearing it.

This is an agency whose detention centers remain largely closed to public scrutiny, whose internal reports have obscured or omitted serious uses of force, and whose agents have repeatedly operated in ways that make meaningful public accountability difficult.

Meanwhile, ICE has built an expansive surveillance dragnet incorporating facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking and massive databases capable of locating and monitoring people across the country.

Put all of these pieces together and the picture should disturb Americans regardless of their views on immigration.

This is no longer merely an immigration enforcement bureaucracy.

It is the architecture of a national police force.

And increasingly, ICE is being positioned to serve the role that secret police forces have historically served in authoritarian systems: operating with extraordinary powers, obscured identities, limited accountability, and a broad mandate to identify, track, detain and remove people whom the government has designated as undesirable.

History teaches that authoritarian governments do not begin with death camps and firing squads.

They begin by normalizing powers that once would have been considered intolerable.

They begin by identifying a population that can be stripped of rights with minimal political consequences. They begin by convincing citizens that extraordinary government powers are necessary because the people being targeted are dangerous, criminal, foreign or undeserving. They begin by making government agents harder to identify and harder to hold accountable. They begin by expanding detention. They begin by expanding surveillance. They begin by lowering the threshold for the use of force.

And they teach the public that obedience is the price of safety.

ICE is serving as the prototype for what a much broader system of authoritarian enforcement could look like.

Immigrants may be the government’s primary targets today. They will not necessarily be the only targets tomorrow.

The constitutional danger has never depended on whether one sympathizes with the first people subjected to government abuse. The question is whether we allow the government to acquire powers that can eventually be turned against anyone.

Once the government normalizes masked federal agents carrying out warrantless sweeps, what prevents those tactics from being used in the name of fighting drugs? Or terrorism? Or political extremism? Or civil unrest? Or public health emergencies? Or whatever crisis comes next?

Once the government builds massive databases capable of tracking people’s movements and associations, those systems do not disappear when immigration enforcement changes. Once detention infrastructure is built, it can be repurposed. Once federal agencies are allowed to operate outside meaningful oversight, restoring those restraints becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Once Americans accept the principle that government agents may inflict pain merely to secure “compliance,” the Constitution has already lost critical ground.

And once anything goes in the name of immigration enforcement, there is little to prevent those same powers from being repurposed in the name of the next crisis.

ICE’s electric shock gloves are merely the latest manifestation of a far more dangerous philosophy that says government knows best. That government commands must be obeyed. That government agents should be feared rather than questioned. That constitutional rights become negotiable whenever officials invoke public safety. That accountability is an inconvenience. And that force is an acceptable substitute for consent.

This is precisely the mentality the Constitution was intended to restrain.

The Fourth Amendment does not say obey first and challenge the government later.

The First Amendment does not protect only speech that government agents find agreeable.

The Fifth Amendment does not permit government to dispense with due process because officials have decided someone probably does not belong here.

And the Constitution contains no exception allowing government agents to punish people simply because they fail to show sufficient deference.

Yet that is the direction in which the American police state continues to move.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, every expansion of government power comes wrapped in assurances that it will be used sparingly, responsibly and only against people who deserve it.

Then the definition of who deserves it expands.

Government power does not police itself. Neither will ICE.

The gloves are off.

The question now is how much more power Americans are willing to place in the government’s hands before we finally recognize what is being built around us.

WC: 1086

BOSTON, Mass. — The government cannot use arrests, detention and the threat of deportation to frighten people into silence for expressing political views it disfavors.

That is the warning being sounded by civil liberties groups as Trump administration officials appeal a federal judge’s finding that they violated the First Amendment by deliberately seeking “to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble” through highly publicized deportation actions against lawful U.S. residents such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. The government has justified its actions by invoking a rarely used provision of immigration law allowing the Secretary of State to seek the removal of noncitizens deemed harmful to U.S. foreign policy interests.

The Rutherford Institute joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations led by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) in filing an amicus brief opposing the government’s appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in AAUP v. Rubio. The coalition argues that the First Amendment prohibits the government from discriminating against noncitizens based on their viewpoints or using deportation to punish constitutionally protected speech. The Institute also joined a similar amicus brief led by the Cato Institute in The Stanford Daily v. Rubio, which raises similar concerns over government efforts that have caused noncitizens to self-censor out of fear that their political speech could result in detention or deportation.

“The power to deport cannot be allowed to become a weapon of political censorship,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Arrest a few people for speaking out, make examples of them, and you don’t have to arrest everyone else. Fear will do the censoring for you. The First Amendment exists precisely to prevent government officials from deciding which political viewpoints may safely be expressed. Once government is permitted to punish people for their political beliefs, no one’s speech is safe.”

A group of academic organizations with noncitizen members sued officials in the Trump administration, alleging that the administration’s public statements and deportation actions caused their members to censor themselves out of fear that they would be targeted like Khalil and Öztürk. In effect, the government did not have to arrest or deport every dissenting speaker because its treatment of a few was enough to make others afraid to speak.

Following a trial, U.S. District Judge William G. Young—who was nominated to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985—found that administration officials had intentionally sought “to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence.” The court also pointed to the manner in which the arrests were carried out—including arrests by masked agents, sometimes on the street without prior notice, followed by transportation across the country for detention—as evidence of the chilling effect. Judge Young found that “the manner and method of their execution was adopted, or at least approved of . . . in part intentionally to chill the speech of other” similarly situated speakers.

Rejecting explanations for ICE agents wearing masks as “disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable,” the judge concluded that “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence.” The court found that Trump administration officials had misused “the sweeping powers of their respective offices” to “strike fear into” noncitizens and curb lawful pro-Palestinian speech. Calling the case “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court,” Judge Young warned that if a federal agency such as the Department of Homeland Security can be weaponized to suppress the free speech rights of “a small, hapless group of non-citizens in our midst,” other agencies can likewise be weaponized against “the President's ever growing list of ‘enemies’ or opponents he ‘hates.’” As Judge Young observed, “the only constitutional rights upon which we can depend are those we extend to the weakest . . . among us.”

In pushing back against the Trump administration’s efforts to overturn Judge Young’s ruling, the civil liberties coalition argues that the administration’s actions echo episodes in American history in which immigration powers were used to suppress political dissent and resemble practices in countries such as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, where governments punish speech critical of those in power.

Conor T. Fitzpatrick and others with FIRE advanced the arguments in the AAUP v. Rubio amicus brief. Thomas A. Berry, Dan Greenberg, and Samuel Rutzick with the Cato Institute, as well as EmilyRose Johns, advanced the arguments in The Stanford Daily v. Rubio amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. National Guard, but our military.”—President Trump

The National Guard was just the beginning.

One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.

The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might someday be used not to defend the people but to control them. They understood something Americans are being encouraged to forget: soldiers and police serve fundamentally different purposes.

When the president sends troops to police domestic unrest that civilian authorities are capable of handling, he crosses a dangerous constitutional line.

When soldiers are stationed indefinitely on American streets, assisting police operations, patrolling subway stations, tourist attractions, neighborhoods and parks, that line becomes even harder to see.

When troops become so commonplace that they are used for everything from snow removal and medical emergencies to groundskeeping and beautification projects, something more insidious happens.

Military occupation begins to look normal.

And when the president uses that military presence as a demonstration of his personal power over the nation’s capital, the warning embedded in the Posse Comitatus Act becomes impossible to ignore.

The military is not supposed to be the president’s national police force.

Yet that is increasingly what Donald Trump is turning it into.

One year ago, when Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

The emergency is long over.

The troops never left.

Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.

That is not an emergency response.

That is a standing military presence.

The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.

What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.

Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.

During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.

Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.

That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.

The symbolism is hard to miss.

Temporary deployments do not usually require hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent-style housing, any more than constitutional government requires turning the White House into a military outpost.

This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.

First the government identifies a crisis. Then it claims extraordinary powers to confront that crisis. Then the crisis ends. And the extraordinary powers and government overreach remain.

A year ago, the Trump administration insisted that military force was necessary to restore law and order to Washington, even though violent crime was at its lowest level in 30 years.

Today, crime continues to decline, yet there is apparently no circumstance under which the government considers the mission accomplished.

That tells you everything you need to know.

The deployment was never merely about crime. It was about establishing a precedent.

That precedent says the president can put troops on American streets, keep them there after the purported emergency has passed, assign them ever-expanding civilian functions and eventually turn their presence into such an ordinary feature of daily life that Americans stop asking why soldiers are patrolling their neighborhoods in the first place.

That is precisely the danger the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to guard against.

Enacted in 1878, the Act embodies one of the oldest principles of constitutional government: except where Congress or the Constitution specifically authorizes it, the military should not be used to execute civilian law.

There is good reason for that prohibition.

Police are supposed to protect civil order while operating within a constitutional system built around warrants, probable cause, due process, civilian accountability and limits on force. The military is trained to identify threats, take territory, defeat enemies and obey a chain of command.

Confuse those roles and eventually citizens become enemy combatants, neighborhoods become occupied territory, and political dissent becomes a security threat.

We do not have to speculate about where this leads.

We have already begun to see it.

When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.

That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.

Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.

It is a profound, constitutional difference.

A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.

The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.

That mindset is increasingly visible not only in the administration’s policies but in Trump’s carefully cultivated image of presidential power.

Throughout history, authoritarian rulers have understood the propaganda value of martial imagery. Mussolini surrounded himself with Blackshirts and military pageantry. Hitler’s meticulously staged uniforms, rallies and parades projected total command over the German state. Stalin and Mao enveloped themselves in the imagery of military power and revolutionary force.

The message was unmistakable: I am not merely your political leader. I am your protector, your commander and your law.

Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.

Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.

It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.

That would be a mistake.

Propaganda matters because it tells people how power wishes to be seen. Trump’s increasingly martial self-portraits complement a presidency that repeatedly treats domestic political problems as military problems, political opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, protesters as insurgents, cities as territory to be liberated, and federal force as the preferred instrument for imposing order.

The message is not subtle.

This is how Trump sees presidential power: Not merely as persuasion. Not merely as leadership. Not merely as authority derived from the consent of the governed. But as authoritarian power backed by military force.

The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.

Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.

Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.

A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.

And Washington is the ideal laboratory for normalizing it.

Because the District of Columbia is not a state, its residents lack many of the political and constitutional defenses available elsewhere. The president exercises direct control over the D.C. National Guard, while Congress retains enormous power over the city’s local government.

That makes Washington uniquely vulnerable. It also makes it uniquely useful as a testing ground.

What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.

Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.

Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.

That is encouraging, but it is not reassuring enough.

The real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.

That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.

This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.

Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.

This is how republics lose their safeguards: Not always through dramatic coups. Not always through tanks surrounding the legislature.

Sometimes it happens more quietly: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.

Last year, we warned that the police state had developed a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

A year later, the greater danger is that Americans are getting used to it.

The troops are still there. The emergency is gone.

The president has extended their presence through the end of his term.

And the sight of soldiers performing civilian functions in the nation’s capital is slowly being transformed from an extraordinary exercise of government power into just another part of the scenery.

As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.

The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.

The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.

Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.

Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.

We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.

WC: 1903

The National Guard was just the beginning.

One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.

When Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.

The emergency is long over.

The troops never left.

Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.

That is not an emergency response.

That is a standing military presence.

The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.

What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.

Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.

During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.

Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.

That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.

The symbolism is hard to miss.

This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.

We do not have to speculate about where this leads.

We have already begun to see it.

When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.

That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.

Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.

It is a profound, constitutional difference.

A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.

The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.

Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.

Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.

It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.

That would be a mistake.

This is how Trump sees presidential power: as authoritarian power backed by military force.

The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.

Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.

Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.

A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.

And Washington is the ideal laboratory as a testing ground.

What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.

Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.

Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.

That is encouraging, but the real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.

That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.

This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.

The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.

Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.

This is how republics lose their safeguards: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.

As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.

The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.

The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.

Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.

Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.

We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.

WC: 1076

PORT ST JOE, Fla. — The Rutherford Institute is urging the City of Port St. Joe, Fla., to work with a local business owner to find a prompt, practical resolution to a dispute involving a proposed 18-foot cross display on private property.

Drawing on more than four decades of experience helping citizens and public officials resolve disputes involving religious expression, free speech, land-use regulations and public safety, Institute attorneys offered recommendations aimed at balancing the legitimate interests of both sides: the City’s responsibility to enforce reasonable structural and public-safety requirements and the property owner’s First Amendment right to engage in religious expression on private property.

The Institute weighed in as a concerned civil liberties organization seeking a reasonable resolution that respects the legitimate interests of both sides.

As part of its continuing effort to educate the public and government officials about the constitutional protections afforded expressive displays on private property, the Institute has also issued a Constitutional Q&A, “The Right to Display First Amendment Messages on Private Property.”

“The First Amendment is not reserved for government-approved messages,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “It protects the right to express religious, political and philosophical beliefs across the spectrum. Government may enforce legitimate, neutral safety rules, but it cannot favor some viewpoints, diminish others or make protected expression unnecessarily difficult.”

For more than four decades, The Rutherford Institute has defended individuals and organizations seeking to display a broad range of religious, political and philosophical messages on their own property or in places otherwise open to expression.

• In Harrisonburg, Va., the Institute intervened after city zoning officials threatened a church with criminal prosecution over pro-life signs displayed on church property. City ordinances permitted certain governmental, corporate, civic and holiday banners while prohibiting the church’s messages.
• In Ocala, Fla., Rutherford Institute attorneys defended sporting-goods store owners who were ordered to remove a Gadsden flag bearing the words “Don’t Tread on Me” while governmental flags remained permitted.
• The Institute also challenged Grayson County, Va., after local officials denied approval for an interfaith spiritual organization to establish a retreat center on privately owned land.

The Institute’s work has also included defending the right to display Christmas symbols and other religious messages. Its longstanding guidance emphasizes that private religious expression may not be excluded merely because it is religious and that privately sponsored displays in public forums generally must be treated according to the same reasonable rules that apply to comparable secular displays.

Although the First Amendment generally protects signs, flags, symbols, artwork and other expressive displays on private property, those rights are not absolute. Local governments may enforce reasonable, content-neutral rules addressing matters such as structural safety, size, height, lighting, setbacks and placement. However, those regulations may not favor certain messages, exempt government-approved topics or viewpoints while prohibiting others, or impose unnecessary burdens because officials object to a display’s religious or political meaning.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.” — Chalmers Johnson

What goes around comes around.

That is the terrible law of blowback.

When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.

They come home.

They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt.

They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.

This is blowback.

Blowback isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state—and the fact that it is “we the people” who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.

President Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home.

For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent.

There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.

There is, however, a mounting bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom.

This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world.

The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them.

It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.

We have seen this before.

Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing.

Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.

The blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback from wars of the past.

Retaliation may not arrive in the form of a missile—it may arrive through a computer terminal connected to a small-town water plant.

In recent days, hackers reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least seven states. More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted. Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities temporarily lost normal operations.

Officials reported no contamination and no resulting threat to public health.

We were fortunate this time. But what happens next time?

Although Iran is suspected of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation for the war.

Whether or not Iran is behind these cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of networked infrastructure, the battlefield is everywhere.

It is the water treatment plant. The electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The communications network. The family car. The phone in your pocket.

That is the danger of pouring America’s resources into policing the globe while neglecting the systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and leaving the homeland dangerously exposed.

That imbalance is no accident. It is the inevitable consequence of empire.

American troops remain stationed across the world, operating from a sprawling network of foreign bases and carrying out missions that most Americans never hear about, much less debate or authorize.

As of June 2025, roughly 170,000 active-duty American military personnel were stationed around the globe, along with tens of thousands of reservists and civilian Defense Department employees.

Even those figures may understate the true scope of America’s overseas military presence, given the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.”

The official explanations change with every administration.

We are told that the troops are protecting democracy, preserving stability, defending freedom, securing vital interests, deterring aggression or preventing the next attack.

In practice, the United States intervenes in one country after another, guards foreign oil supplies and shipping routes, protects corporate interests, arms favored regimes, topples disfavored governments and leaves American taxpayers responsible for the cost.

This is not national defense. It is empire.

And empire always generates blowback.

Every country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for retaliation.

That retaliation does not always come from another army.

It comes through terrorist cells. It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks, transportation networks and communications systems.

It comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships and businesses.

It comes through oil shocks, disrupted trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency appropriations, and still more national debt.

Blowback carries a staggering price tag—and the war profiteers are not the ones expected to pay it. The American people are.

War spending is bankrupting America.

The United States maintains a global network of foreign bases, overseas installations, weapons systems, intelligence operations and permanent deployments that costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars year after year.

That is before the government launches another war.

Once the bombing begins, the costs multiply.

Missiles must be replaced. Weapons stockpiles must be replenished. Damaged ships must be repaired. Troops must be deployed. Contractors must be paid. Foreign governments must be subsidized. Emergency spending bills must be rushed through Congress.

The military-industrial complex profits from every deployment, every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new enemy created.

Meanwhile, the politicians claim there is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems, modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect communities from disasters here at home.

This is the economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when asked to protect the American people from the consequences.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed.

But those staggering costs tell only part of the story, because the Pentagon repeatedly cannot account for the money it is allotted.

Decades of failed audits, missing funds, contractor overcharges, waste and outright profiteering have transformed war into one of the most lucrative forms of government welfare ever devised.

That corruption is not merely wasteful—it is deadly.

Every dollar squandered on an overpriced weapons system or lost in the Pentagon’s accounting maze is a dollar unavailable to safeguard a water plant, secure a hospital network, strengthen the electrical grid or rebuild a community devastated by disaster.

The consequences are not merely financial.

Decades of bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against the United States.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort Hood shooting was blowback.

To recognize this as blowback is not to excuse terrorism.

There is no justification for murdering innocent people. Yet neither can we pretend that terrorist attacks emerge from a historical or political vacuum. The perpetrators were responsible for their crimes, but in each instance, American wars and foreign policy formed part of the grievance used to justify violence.

Refusing to acknowledge that connection does not make Americans safer. It merely ensures that the cycle continues.

And the cycle does not end with retaliation.

Every new threat becomes a justification for more surveillance, more secrecy, more military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer constitutional restraints.

Indeed, the most dangerous blowback may be the government’s ongoing efforts to turn America into a battlefield—militarizing the police and treating the American people like suspects and enemy combatants.

The government creates the danger abroad, then uses the danger it created to demand more power at home.

James Madison warned that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Perpetual war, Madison understood, gives birth to armies, debts, taxes and instruments of domination. It concentrates power in the hands of the few while forcing the many to submit, sacrifice and pay.

More than a century later, President Dwight Eisenhower echoed Madison’s warning, observing that the machinery built to wage those perpetual wars had become a danger in its own right. He called it the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex—an influence capable of endangering our liberties and democratic processes.

Eisenhower understood that a permanent war machine must continually invent new missions, new threats and new enemies in order to justify its existence.

We failed to heed his warning.

Just as dangerous as a government capable of waging war without end is a government determined to ensure that no one responsible will ever be called to account.

The United States insists on the power to police the world, punish foreign leaders, bomb foreign countries and dictate the rules of international conduct.

Yet when those same rules threaten to be applied to American officials or their allies, the government rejects the authority of international courts, sanctions their judges and attempts to cripple their ability to investigate alleged war crimes.

The double standard could not be clearer.

The American government claims the right to sit in judgment over the world while refusing to be judged for its own actions.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a nation that abandons the rule of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has little power to restrain its government at home.

This, too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a government that ceases to serve its people.

More than half a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. warned where this cycle of hatred, retaliation and unchecked power would lead. In his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, King declared:

“We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate… We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace … and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

There can be no confusion about the path President Trump has chosen: empire over republic, violence over peace, and personal glory over the lives and liberties of the American people.

WC: 1956

What goes around comes around.

That is the terrible law of blowback.

When the United States bombs another country, threatens its government, kills its people, occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future, the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of miles away.

They come home.

They come home in flag-draped coffins and shattered military families. They come home in retaliatory attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted shipping lanes, higher energy prices, depleted weapons stockpiles, and trillions of dollars in debt.

They come home through hacked water systems, vulnerable power grids, heightened domestic surveillance, militarized police and government demands that the American people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the promise of protection from dangers the government itself helped create.

This is blowback.

Blowback isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the actors of the American police state—and the fact that it is “we the people” who will be paying the price for those terrible decisions for years to come.

President Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no government can bomb, threaten and police the world indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences home.

For months, the Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes, demands for surrender and claims that peace is imminent.

There appears to be no coherent plan for ending the conflict.

There is, however, a mounting bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American dollars, American security and American freedom.

This is what happens when a government appoints itself judge, jury, executioner and police officer to the world.

The government creates enemies faster than it can kill them.

It destabilizes one country, then uses the resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom, surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less safe.

We have seen this before.

Every president promises that the next military intervention will be limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every president assures us that the experts know what they are doing.

Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply, the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American people are left to cope with the consequences.

The blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback from wars of the past.

Retaliation may not arrive in the form of a missile—it may arrive through a computer terminal connected to a small-town water plant.

In recent days, hackers reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least seven states. More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted. Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities temporarily lost normal operations.

Officials reported no contamination and no resulting threat to public health.

We were fortunate this time. But what happens next time?

Although Iran is suspected of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation for the war.

Whether or not Iran is behind these cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of networked infrastructure, the battlefield is everywhere.

It is the water treatment plant. The electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The communications network. The family car. The phone in your pocket.

That is the danger of pouring America’s resources into policing the globe while neglecting the systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and leaving the homeland dangerously exposed.

Every country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for retaliation.

That retaliation does not always come from another army.

It comes through terrorist cells. It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks, transportation networks and communications systems.

It comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships and businesses.

It comes through oil shocks, disrupted trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency appropriations, and still more national debt.

Blowback carries a staggering price tag—and the war profiteers are not the ones expected to pay it. The American people are.

War spending is bankrupting America.

The military-industrial complex profits from every deployment, every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new enemy created.

Meanwhile, the politicians claim there is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems, modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect communities from disasters here at home.

This is the economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when asked to protect the American people from the consequences.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed.

The consequences are not merely financial.

Decades of bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against the United States.

The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort Hood shooting was blowback.

Every new threat becomes a justification to turn America into a battlefield—militarizing the police and treating the American people like suspects and enemy combatants—while paving the way for more surveillance, more secrecy, more military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer constitutional restraints.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a nation that abandons the rule of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has little power to restrain its government at home.

This, too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a government that ceases to serve its people.

WC: 1030