Declan points out some scary stuff here but no president (even Clinton) would be stupid enough to do something so outrageous. They would have to know that it would spark a long running a especially bloody revolution. Why risk it when they can just keep approaching totalitarianism incrementally with such activities as the FuckingDICks "Know Your Customer" activities. It's much quieter and infinitely less likely to result in a revolution. APF

...

"The President has the power to seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, call reserve forces amounting to 2 1/2 million men to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all menas of transportation, regulate all private enterprise, restrict travel, and in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all Americans...

"Most [of these laws] remain a a potential source of virtually unlimited power for a President should he choose to activate them. It is possible that some future President could exercise this vast authority in an attempt to place the United States under authoritarian rule.

"While the danger of a dictatorship arising through legal means may seem remote to us today, recent history records Hitler seizing control through the use of the emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of the Weimar Republic."

--Joint Statement, Sens. Frank Church (D-ID) and Charles McMathias (R-MD) September 30, 1973

I came across this and the Senate special committee's 1973 report on Emergency Powers Statutes in Time Magazine's library. Powerful stuff.

-Declan