Tuesday’s Senate vote reminds me of German ‘Enabling Act’ of 1933

By David McElroy · December 2, 2011

Everyone knows that Adolph Hitler was the absolute dictator of Germany for 12 years, but most people don’t realize he got that power legally. In 1933, the democratically elected German Reichstag passed what came to be known as the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler the power to rule however he pleased.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted to give the president so much power that it reminds me of a first step down that road. In a military authorization bill, the Senate inserted a clause that gives a president the power to have the military arrest a U.S. citizen and send him to a military prison — to be held indefinitely with no trial. Isn’t that something you would have expected from Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia?

Let me repeat that. This legislation will allow a president to unilaterally send any American to rot in jail with no hope of appealing to a court for a trial. All he has to do is claim the person is a suspect in some kind of terror-related crime. And we know that no president will ever misuse his power in order to achieve other purposes. Right? And we know the authorities never jump to conclusions and falsely arrest an American in terror-related cases. Right?

If you trust any person with that kind of power, you’re either naive or insane.

The best perspective I’ve seen on this comes from a Facebook post by Igor Prohorov of Henrico, Va. He puts this serious issue in terms of his own family’s history:

“I’m originally from Ukraine. Some members of my family were imprisoned without trial and taken away to Gulags in Siberia and forced to work as slaves. One of them is my step-grandfather and he still has a hard time talking about his horrible experiences. My family has immigrated to this country to escape authoritarian government, only to find out that the free people of this country are so careless about their own liberties here. We must never allow our government to detain anyone without a trial and hold them indefinitely. This is not what America is all about and anyone who supports this tyranny is destined to suffer the most from it.”

If that doesn’t give you chills, I don’t know how to get through to you.

People such as Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin — who sponsored the measure — assure us that a president needs this power to fight terrorism. Hitler and his Nazi government said the same thing when they got the Reichstag to give him power in 1933. Hitler wasn’t getting this power to become a dictator. Oh, no. The bill was called the “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich.” It was sold as a way to help the country through a time of crisis. Hitler never relinquished that total power. Politicians almost ever voluntarily give up power.

We have a lot of well-meaning people in this country who argue for limited government, but I’d like to know what evidence there is that politicians are ever going to respect the meaning of “limited government.” Over the last century, we have watched the federal government grow ever larger and seize more and more powers. Sometimes, those powers are taken in the name of fighting some temporary threat, but those “temporary” measures almost never end.

I don’t trust any politician with this power. I don’t care whether it’s Barack Obama or George W. Bush or even Ron Paul. And even if you could trust the president today, what about the ones who come later? What makes you think you can trust them?

The coercive state system is broken, but it’s broken in its basic design. The idea that an institution can be given the power to force people to obey it — but that it will limit itself to protecting the rights of the people it’s given the power to coerce — is backwards from the start.

The coercive state has to go, because this country is still on the road to serfdom — and it ultimately leads to open tyranny. But by the time you find yourself or your family in prison, it will be too late. You need to decide how you’re going to deal with that now — while there’s still time.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts