After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and Congress committed the nation to a “global war on terror,” which – for perhaps the first time in U.S. history – the nation launched a military campaign that was aimed more against fighting an ideology rather than an army.

And today, 10 years later, the U.S. finds itself engaged in the kind of perpetual state of war that author George Orwell warned against in his novel, “1984.” In the book, Orwell’s fictional state of Oceania is at perpetual war with Eurasia and Eastasia; today, the U.S. fights “global terror” whenever and wherever it is found. And worse, this perpetual state of war may be about to get both wider and easier to wage.

Defense spending legislation currently pending before Congress could lead to “the single biggest hand-over of unchecked war authorityfrom Congress to the executive branch in modern American history,” the ACLU has warned.