Many people have commented on the Congressional vote to codify the authoritarian powers asserted by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, i.e., the arbitrary, unchallengeable power to declare anyone on earth — including American citizens — an “enemy of the state” and incarcerate them, indefinitely, outside of due process, in military custody.

There is, at this writing, an outside chance that Barack Obama might possibly veto this “enabling decree” — but only on the grounds that to accept Congressional approval of these tyrannical powers might encroach upon the presidential autocrat’s authority to do whatever he or she damn well pleases to anyone he or she wants to destroy. But in any case and every case, the bipartisan political ruling class is united in its steadfast determination to eliminate any last vestige of constitutional liberty or rule of law in the United States.

And whatever the outcome of this particular bill, the reality will remain the same: the President of the United States will continue to claim — and exercise — absolute arbitrary power over the life and liberty of every person on earth. As we’ve said here before, not even Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin at their most megalomaniacal ever dreamed of asserting the kind of universal power now asserted by American presidents and the lickspittlish lackeys in the United States Congress.

There is, alas, no “news” in this. I wrote my first “If the Republic Had Not Died a Long Time Ago” piece several years ago. And Arthur Silber was one of the first (and one of the very few) to point out that the election of then-candidate Barack Obama would only bring  the retrenchment, expansion — and codification — of George W. Bush’s worst constitutional depredations. So it has proven, over and over and over.