From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:
The power of the president is enormous – and may be even more so with presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), classified orders granting vast presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations. PEADs are so secret even Congress cannot see them – and that troubles constitutional scholars. “Sunday Morning” special contributor Ted Koppel reports
If you watch it, you’ll see that the only person who is not troubled by the vast powers claimed by the 48-odd PEADs (or up to 60) is John Woo, the Torturers’ Lawyer, a man who, if the US was not so powerful, would have been tried in The Hague a long time ago for crimes against humanity.
So what happens if Trump uses those powers to suspend habeus corpus, to postpone or cancel the election, to round up his enemies? Short answer: Nobody knows.
During the 1970s, when military officers engaged in informal discussions in the wake of the Nixon Administration, it was the majority consensus that, if Nixon had done such things, that the military would have obeyed their oath of fealty to the Constitution and moved against Nixon.
I don’t have that confidence today.