XPost: alt.gossip.celebrities, alt.politics.democrats.d, sac.general   
   XPost: alt.rush-limbaugh   
   From: mr-snickers@yahoo.com   
      
   WHEN DONALD TRUMP becomes commander in chief in January, he will   
   take on presidential powers that have never been more expansive   
   and unchecked.   
      
   He’ll control an unaccountable drone program, and the prison at   
   Guantanamo Bay. His FBI, including a network of 15,000 paid   
   informants, already has a record of spying on mosques and   
   activists, and his NSA’s surveillance empire is ubiquitous and   
   governed by arcane rules, most of which remain secret. He will   
   inherit bombing campaigns in seven Muslim countries, the de   
   facto ability to declare war unilaterally, and a massive nuclear   
   arsenal — much of which is on hair-trigger alert.   
      
   Caught off guard by Hillary Clinton’s election defeat, Democrats   
   who defended these powers under President Obama may suddenly be   
   having second thoughts as the White House gets handed over to a   
   man they described — with good reason — as “unhinged,” and   
   “dangerously unfit.”   
      
   In the years after the 9/11 terror attacks, Vice President Dick   
   Cheney and his legal adviser David Addington dramatically   
   expanded the powers of the presidency, asserting the unilateral   
   right in wartime to ignore legal limits on things like torture   
   and government eavesdropping. Congressional Democrats generally   
   caved, but made a few efforts to push back.   
      
   The Democrats went silent on executive overreach when Obama was   
   elected, however.   
      
   When the New York Times revealed Bush’s warrantless wiretapping   
   program in 2005, 60 percent of registered Democrats thought the   
   program was “unacceptable.” But after NSA whistleblower Edward   
   Snowden revealed a dramatically larger surveillance apparatus in   
   2013, a 61 percent of Democrats said the opposite — presumably   
   because they trusted the man in charge.   
      
   The Obama administration has counted on that trust repeatedly.   
   When defending the drone program in 2012, instead of referencing   
   its legal standards, administration officials reassured the New   
   York Times that Obama is “a student of the writings on war by   
   Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,” and that CIA director John   
   Brennan is like “a priest with extremely strong moral values who   
   was suddenly charged with leading a war.”   
      
   After eight years of trusting the President with expanding   
   military power, liberals must now reckon with the fact that   
   Obama will pass the same capabilities to a man who has proposed   
   killing terrorists’ innocent family members, who has said he   
   would do “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” and who has   
   suggested dipping bullets in pigs’ blood is sound   
   counterterrorism strategy.   
      
   And most of the paltry few legal limitations that regulate the   
   security state could easily be repealed by a President Trump.   
      
   In 2015, for instance, in response to protests in Ferguson, Mo.,   
   Obama signed an order banning the transfers of certain surplus   
   military weapons to police, including armored vehicles, grenade   
   launchers, bayonets, and high-caliber ammunition. Trump, who has   
   called police the “most mistreated people in America,” and has   
   refused to criticize police for brutality or killings, could   
   easily revoke that ban.   
      
   Trump has said he would create “a deportation force” –   
   apparently ignorant of the fact that he’ll inherit one. Obama   
   has increased the budget for immigration enforcement to an all-   
   time high and accelerated the rate of deportations.  Obama has   
   deported more than 2.5 million people – already more than any   
   other President – and has made the Department of Homeland   
   Security the largest law enforcement agency in the country.   
      
   Obama also already incarcerates hundreds of thousands of   
   immigrants in detention centers, and forces young children to   
   appear before immigration judges without a lawyer.   
      
   Trump will also take over the FBI, which has 35,000 employees   
   and a network of 15,000 paid informants. Trump, who has said   
   Muslim Americans should be forced to register on a government   
   list, could easily rewrite its investigative guidelines.   
      
   As for the NSA, Congress passed a law in 2015 ending the bulk   
   collection of Americans’ phone records and replaced it with a   
   modified program. But according to a former State Department   
   official, the phone records program is minuscule compared to the   
   government’s “universe of collection” under Executive Order   
   12333, which Trump is free to reinterpret or modify.   
      
   To make matters worse, the Obama administration has convinced   
      
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