It's A Dictatorship Folks - Like it or Not

Jack M. Balkin, of Yale Law School has an excellent post summarizing the realities of the Whitehouse's claim to unlimited dictatorial power over at his blog Balkinization. One wonders why none of the overpaid pundits in the national media cannot think this through. From the media view you would think it is business as usual in Washington.

Here is an excerpt but read the whole thing.

This theory, taken to its logical conclusions, gives the President the ability to treat anyone living in the United States, including particularly U.S. citizens, as wartime enemies without having to prove their disloyalty to anyone outside the executive branch. In so doing, it offers him what can only be called dictatorial powers-- that is, the power to suspend ordinary civil liberties protections on his say so. The limits on what the President may do under this theory are entirely political-- the question is whether the American people will stand for what the President has done if they discover what he has done in their name. But if the American people don't know what their executive is doing, they can hardly be in a position to object. And so the President has tried to keep secret exactly what he has done under the unreasonable and overreaching theory of Presidential power that his Administration has repeatedly asserted in its legal briefs and public statements.

tip to Atrios