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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/rule_by_decree_the_emergency_states_plot_to_override_the_constitution

Rule by Decree: The Emergency State’s Plot to Override the Constitution

“Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”—Justice Neil Gorsuch

We have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

COVID-19, for example, served as the driving force behind what Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch characterized as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

“Federal executive officials entered the act too.  Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.  They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement.  Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.

“While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent.  Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.”

Yet while the government’s (federal and state) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

These attempts to use various crises to override the Constitution are still happening.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be: civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

They have all become fair game to a government that continues to quietly assemble, test and deploy emergency powers a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution and can be activated at a moment’s notice.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

While these are powers the police state has been working to make permanent, they barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has unilaterally claimed for itself without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. ... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now.

The seeds of this ongoing madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.“

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

Essentially, the president would become a dictator for life.

It has happened already.

As we have witnessed in recent years, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.

So, too, every action taken by the current occupant of the White House and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government makes us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The Executive Branch’s willingness to circumvent the Constitution by leaning heavily on the president’s so-called emergency powers constitutes a gross perversion of what limited power the Constitution affords the president.

As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.” Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”

In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Obama, Bush, Trump and now Biden—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects (including American citizens) indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to wage wars without congressional authorization, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to establish a standing army on American soil, to operate a shadow government, to declare national emergencies for any manipulated reason, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—have become a permanent part of the president’s toolbox of terror.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

As an investigative report by the Brennan Center explains:

“There are currently 41 declared national emergencies, most of which have been in place for more than a decade… Some of the emergency powers Congress has made available to the president are so breathtaking in their vastness that they would make an autocrat do a spit take. Presidents can use emergency declarations to shut down communications infrastructure, freeze private assets without judicial process, control domestic transportation, or even suspend the prohibition on government testing of chemical and biological agents on unwitting human subjects.”

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

We must recalibrate the balance of power.

For starters, Congress should put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

At a minimum, as The Washington Post suggests, “all emergency declarations [s]hould expire automatically after three or six months, whereupon Congress would need to vote upon any proposed extension. It is time for both parties to recognize that governing via endless crises — even when they are employed to implement broadly popular policies that win plaudits from key political constituencies — subverts our system of constitutional government.”

We’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.

As Justice Gorsuch recognized:

“Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes. We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.”

Unfortunately, the process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it must start with “we the people.”

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https://edwardcurtin.com/the-rehearsed-life-and-planned-history/

The Rehearsed Life and Planned History

“The technical achievement of advanced industrial society, and the effective manipulation of mental and material productivity have brought about a shift in the locus of mystification. . . . the rational rather than the irrational becomes the most effective vehicle of mystification.”   – Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

“General, man is very uselful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.”                –  Bertolt Brecht, “From a German War Primer”

Langdon Winner opens his prescient book, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986), with an anecdote about John Glenn and his experience orbiting the earth in 1962 aboard Friendship 7.  After long, rigorous training in simulators, Glenn found that when he looked at earth from orbit – only the third man after Soviet pilots Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov to do so – he felt as if he had seen it all before.  Rather than a sense of awe, he felt that his training exercises had deprived him of true experience.  Winner writes, “Synthetic conditions generated in the training center had begun to seem more ‘real’ than the actual experience.”

Glenn’s example might seem unusual for the early 1960s, but it is now commonplace, the rule rather than the exception.  I think many people today sense, but can’t admit, that technology has usurped direct human experience while presumably enhancing it with so-called awe-inspiring, tech-enhanced products.  Just as people walk around embalming time with their camera phones, there is something funereal about activities that have been rehearsed, reviewed, and planned on digital screens before they are undertaken.  It’s as if the hearse doesn’t come rolling in soon enough.

I just checked the local weather forecast and “they” say there is a 37.235 % chance of showers on Saturday, six days away.  Should I start worrying today since I have planned a picnic for that day?  Would I be wrong to wonder when on that future day, if it ever arrives and I am around to greet it, that the 37.235 % chance of showers applies? Day or night, morning or afternoon?  The picnic is scheduled for 1-3 PM, so should I play it by the odds and assume those 8.33 % of the 24 hours have a decent chance of avoiding the 37.235 %?  Should I live by numbers and computer simulations?

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis, a man not opposed to science, tells us:

There is something that unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique. . .

Why was Glenn circling the earth anyway?

If the novelty of experience and the real objective value of the outside world have been crippled by the repetitive and predictive nature of technology, it is worth reminding ourselves of the simple truth that technology does not just happen; it is rooted in a philosophical premise of control, the inability to let the earth breathe and to stop trying to control life.  This is a human choice.

It is possible to show reverence for nature and our part in it and to use technology for humane goals, not because we are adept at techniques, but because we understand that human beings are emphatically not machines but spiritual and moral beings. This has seldom been the case in modern times. To do so demands asking what are our first principles and what are the ends we are seeking.  This requires subordinating science and technology to higher values.  All technical decisions are political and all political decisions are moral.

Most new technologies of the past two hundred years have been touted as “revolutionary,” machines that will radically transform life for the better – i.e. leading to less labor, more equality, and the enrichment of human experience.  Nowhere has this been truer than with the promotion of the computer and the digital “revolution” with its information superhighway – the  Internet – that has been sold as leading to more benefits than the mind can imagine.  The result, however, has been the loss of our minds as the nonsense that “information is power” has become a mantra of those controlling the digital information flow, as they promote information as an elixir for democracy.  Such a strange sort of democracy it is where more and more power has accrued to the power elites and diversions of data and digital dementia to regular people who have a hard time remembering and forgetting, seemingly an odd couple if ever there were one.

Currently you hear a lot of complaining about artificial intelligence (AI), as if its development is some great surprise.  Much of this caviling has been coming from the very people who created AI and continue to develop it.  Now these experts are warning that it could get out of control, so we must be careful and take action since we risk “extinction” from AI.   Only an idiot wouldn’t laugh at such rhetoric.  Who are the “we” who need to take action?  The fear campaign never stops, while the controls tighten.

Thirty-seven years ago Winner wrote:

Some observers forecast that ‘the computer revolution’ will eventually be guided by new wonders in artificial intelligence.  Its present course is influenced by something more familiar: the absent mind.

And malevolent hubris.

For AI has been the stuff of popular screen and book entertainment for a long time, dress rehearsed in the popular consciousness far in advance of opening night.  Now that the hearse has appeared and the identity of its occupants has become cause for wonderment, much chatter has erupted on the Internet.  Could we be dead?  Where are our controls?

The process of creating dread has been rather smooth, so surprise is an odd reaction.  We have been in the simulators far longer that John Glenn was in his, and we too have seen it all before.  First they created millions of artificial people drip-by-drip by drugging them with the “magic” of technological devices that were “irresistible,” then, when most of “reality” had become unreal and people had downloaded their natural lives into the devices, they roll out the latest fraud about how the machines are taking over from humans, as if people don’t have hands and eyes and walk upon the earth; that they can’t see the birds in the trees or feel the breeze upon their heads.  That they are not free to determine their own lives.

Be afraid, for “you have no freedom” has been the message for decades.  This is the repetitious, implicit message of fear used to paralyze people.  The AI experts who create the instruments of “control,” even as they continue to develop them, then warn of their dangers.  Here is their recent one sentence warning:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other society-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Is that so?  Our Dr. Frankensteins  are so kind to create these monsters only to warn us about them.

Have you heard it all before?

Have you seen it all before?

Is the same-old, same-old getting you down?

Does the news seem like déjà vu all over again?

Does your life seem rehearsed and official history produced in advance?

Has the Weirdness arrived?

I think it’s fair to say that wherever people travel these days, it’s as if they were already there before they even left.  Or at least the pictures they have seen have taken the newness out of the places they are going to in today’s simulated life.  Nearly a century ago in The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway had his protagonist Jake Barnes say to Robert Cohen, when Cohen asks Barnes to go to South America with him and Barnes won’t:

‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘All countries look just like the moving pictures.’

Moving pictures – how quaint that sounds today when the moving pictures now move in the dinguses in people’s pockets wherever people move, on the go to nowhere new.  John Glenn would probably understand.

In his concluding chapter, Winner write::

More and more, the whole language used to talk about technology and social policy – the language of ‘risks,’ ‘impacts,’ and ‘trade-offs’ – smacks of betrayal. The excruciating subtleties of measurement and modeling mask embarrassing shortcomings in human judgment.  We have become careful with numbers, callous with everything else. Our methodological rigor is becoming spiritual rigor mortis. [my emphasis]

This leads me back to the Internet and all the verbal and pictorial information published there. This is where most people now get their “news” and analyses about the “outside” world, where they get much of their official history before it happens. Even when people have learned how to choose sites judiciously, it is still information overload that destroys their ability to think, to remember what is important and forget the inessential.

Paul Virilio, the French scholar of technology and speed (dromology), calls it the “information bomb” (added to the nuclear and genetic bombs), the glut of repetitive information that deranges regular people but is a boon to the elites who think they are in full control of people’s minds and the technology they promote.  Virilio writes:

A black hole of Progress into which has now fallen this whole philanoia, this love of madness on the part of the sciences and technologies, which is now seeking to organize the self-extinction of a species that is too slow. . . . Not liberation, but global takeover of humanity by totalitarian multimedia powers, applying intensely to populations that age-old strategy which consists in sowing division everywhere – between peoples, regions, towns, countries, races, religions, sexes, generations, and even within families.

Like John Glenn’s loss of awe while in orbit because of his simulator experience, and like the rehearsal for travel and so much else people do through screens – “pre-planning,” as the redundant word usage reveals the truth – the Internet has become a place to lose your mind as fast as you can and to make sure your life is devoid of surprises.

And because Internet content is posted so rapidly and in such large quantities, the providers and their readers can’t move on from the past because they are repeating it in ways that let them hold onto it without understanding it. There is no “space” for new thoughts.  It is analogous to those individuals who have suffered some childhood trauma but because it was so overwhelming, keep unconsciously repeating it in disguised form, rather than facing its truth and creating a new future.

Some of the Internet repetition is unconscious and innocent blather, and much of it is the basic method of propaganda.  Repeat and repeat the lies so that those hearing them can’t imagine there could be another truth.  And then those hearing them can’t forget what they have heard so often because, as Thoreau once said, “It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember.” And of course they can’t remember what they never heard since it has been omitted.  Propaganda is two-faced.

There is a stuckness to so much on the Internet because the space is unlimited and sites keep posting at rapid-fire speed to keep up with each other. The Internet is like a clogged highway on a Friday evening with hoards fleeing to the same “isolated” getaway.  By the time they get there, they wonder why they ever left, or if they did.

If you stop reading or viewing the Internet for a week or more, and then return, you won’t miss much.

Take, for example, Russia-gate and the recently released Durham Report.  Patrick Lawrence has written an intriguing article about it: John Durham and the Burying of American History.  

Special Counsel Durham’s four year investigation, “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” is, as Lawrence says, more a confirmation than a revelation.  It verifies in a tricky way what some have known for seven years and others continue to deny because the implications are so explosive: that in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and the FBI conspired to create the Russia-gate hoax to smear Donald Trump as a Russian proxy to help Clinton get elected president.  The CIA and FBI knew from the start that the claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy were completely fraudulent.

Once Trump was surprisingly elected, however, the Russia-gate lies were repeated endlessly for years by the conspirators, the mainstream press, and some alternative media.  Such propaganda had the effect of fueling hatred for Russia and President Putin, NATO’s continuing expansion to Russia’s borders, Ukraine’s neo-Nazi ongoing attacks on the Donbass, the persecution of Julian Assange as Clinton regularly accused him and Trump of being in cahoots with the Russian government, and eventually, after enough U.S. provocations, led to the present U.S./NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the growing danger of nuclear war.

The Durham Report lays out some of the conspiracy that led to them, but not these consequences.  It doesn’t call for criminal prosecutions and is very lacking in many ways; it excludes the central role of CIA Director John Brennan and the false and discredited Clinton claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers to help elect Trump by releasing the material through Wikileaks, etc.  No one hacked those emails, as Ray McGovern and Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have shown time and again.

It is a limited-hangout, a report so late and lacking that most people will have forgotten what engendered it, and, if that isn’t enough, the mainstream media is burying it anyway.

I mention Lawrence’s article, not because I agree with all his points – i.e. his historical examples exclude the Covid hoax and he claims that “Watergate was at bottom one man’s scandal,” which it surely was not – nor to analyze the report, but to pick up on points he makes about the burying of history and our faculties of remembering and forgetting.  He writes:

To value history, Nietzsche told us in very different circumstances, is ‘to understand the meaning of the phrase ‘it was.’ But the health of an individual, a people, or of a culture he also said, depended on forgetting, too: It is only when we can forget that we escape the bonds of the past and dare to begin again, to imagine and create, ‘to perceive as we have never perceived before.’ Having the certainty of a written history is what makes possible this desirable kind of forgetting.

I think understanding these ideas is necessary for understanding what has become of us in the era of digital simulacra, how we have lost our way while learning to imitate rather than live. Our reactions have become copies of copies.  History has become a series of pseudo-debates with fewer and fewer matters factually settled so one can forget and move on.  While the Internet provides us with massive amounts of information, some of it very important, its very nature or the method of its delivery of its content controverts its claim to seriousness.  It is hard to remember or forget when one subjects oneself to a steady stream of electronic images that speed through one’s mind like flashing lights.

Forgetting is usually considered a bad attribute that happens to you, not something good that one can do.  It has come to be associated with ailments such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.  Rarely is it seen as a necessary art – Nietzsche’s “music of forgetting” – that one might practice in order to make “room” for the onrushing future.  For we know that the significance of the past depends on its importance for the future and only once one takes a stance toward the past can one create a new future. This is true for individuals and society.  Learning to remember the past so as to forget it for the future is central.

Lawrence uses the JFK assassination, which occurred 60 years ago, as an example.  The Internet is full of articles that still debate the assassination, as if the facts were not clear long ago.  These pseudo-debates encourage readers to forget the facts – that the CIA killed Kennedy – and that the evidence is readily available if one reads a few scholarly books with impeccable sources, such as James W. Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable; Why He Died and Why It Matters.  (Books obviously differ significantly from the Internet.)  How long such nonsense will continue is a guessing game, but because the truth is so unsettling, as is Russia-gate, I suspect it will continue for a long time.  One is encouraged to remember incidentals, while the core is elided to keep the debate going.

It is true, as Lawrence says, that certain lies are too big to fail, for if they did and entered the official histories as truths, they would be preserved, not to be forgotten. Then society could deal with their implications. But as long as matters such as the facts in the Durham Report (and the report’s omissions), the JFK assassination, etc., are buried or endlessly debated, as they are being now, their continuing ramifications in Ukraine, U.S. politics, etc. will be more deadly history planned in advance and nothing will seem new or hopeful.  Like John Glenn, we will have seen it all before in our simulated lives.

Only to repeat it as we fly in circles in a country of endless lies.