At some point in the first term, however, experts surmise that an even more secret briefing occurs, one that has never been publicly acknowledged. In it, the new president learns how to blow up the Constitution.
The session introduces “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties. In the words of a rare declassified official description, the documents outline how to “implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations”—by imposing martial law, suspending habeas corpus, seizing control of the internet, imposing censorship, and incarcerating so-called subversives, among other repressive measures. “We know about the nuclear briefcase that carries the launch codes,” Joel McCleary, a White House official in the Carter Administration, told me. “But over at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department there’s a list of all the so-called enemies of the state who would be rounded up in an emergency. I’ve heard it called the ‘enemies briefcase.’ ”
Emphasis mine. Now, the CoG stuff was relatively well-known by the public; a decent amount of it was declassified a few years ago. But the existence of the PEADs was not previously known to the public.
The article goes into a lot of detail about supra-legislative authorities that the United States president has, and where those authorities come from, but I'd like to focus specifically on the passage quoted above.
Do you think (and why do you think) that the U.S. government should actively maintain plans to dissolve the Constitution and suspend civil rights in the country? If so, under what circumstances should these plans be put into effect?
Personally I feel that they should not do this, because civil rights are fundamentally important things which the populace shouldn't have stripped from them.
